The doors are locked and also boarded, and the boards seem to be quite thoroughly stuck, as far as the bots can tell.

"Glam, you wanna get this bot a circular saw?"

Bot, meet circular saw.

Circular saw meet boards.

Circular saw goes poof.

"Oh joy."

Maybe a few bots can pry a board off if they coordinate.

The bots cannot seem to pry a board off even coordinating.

"This is getting seriously annoying," they complain. And try making more stuff appear. And it fails. And this is really annoying. "Can your bots detect whether there's anyone in there? Like, I dunno, infrared?"

"I don't have that working through walls."

Try try try try!

...whisper to shoulderbot in private channel: "I can't even get stuff to appear."

"Is that localized?" the shoulderbot replies at once. "Try across town, here's a feed -"

They look at the feed—

—how can it be localized, is the same person in every scene? And how can they be preventing things from being conjured in the first place?—

—and fail.

"You sure no one's looking there?"

"Bot hasn't encountered anybody. Can you make stuff near yourself?"

"Yeah, I'm wearing my suit—"

What suit?

"...my suit's gone."

And given the calculated path, Transit should be arriving any minute now.

"We'll work on that later," Lorica says.

And Transit pops a bot in and pops himself out right away before his guaranteed safe landing point can change that feature.

The interior of the warehouse is not unoccupied, for a certain value of "occupied." There are people inside.

None of them are alive.

There is a laptop as the only light source, illuminating a wall. On the wall, the words 'MERRY CHRISTMAS' are written in copious amounts of blood. A corpse is stuck to the wall, with a Glasgow smile on its face, dressed like Santa Claus. Its gut was cut open, and its entrails are encircling a bloody Christmas tree standing to its side. The rest of the space completes the scene: a macabre Christmas feast, with corpses sitting at it, decorated with more Glasgow smiles, and on the table body parts, many of them looked like someone actually chewed on parts of them.

"Well that's fucking disgusting," comments Lorica.

The bot begins investigating the scene for whatever was streaming the audio and other points of interest.

There are more body parts strewn about in hidden or shadowy corners so as not to ruin the scene, and the source of the audio seems to be the laptop. There's a folder open with various audio files, all of whose "created at" timestamps refer to earlier today, the most recent one being just before the bots arrived outside to investigate. The wounds on the corpses are indeed fresh, and they all seem to have died of them.

Sigh. Lorica relays everything higher up. She is only a Ward and does not have to actually deal with this shit on a decisionmaking level today.

Higher up says she should use her bots to see if they can find anything nearby: trails of blood, suspiciously positioned objects, people, anything. If those files are anything to go by, whoever did this was there less than an hour before. If her bots can do anything like collecting DNA samples or maybe finding more stuff with UV light that'd be welcome. She could ask Glam for more bots if she needs them, and the other heroes and more PRT are on their way to investigate more thoroughly.

Bots can take samples, although they won't be particularly good ones since they don't have forensic kits and Glam cannot pinch hit right now. The bots zoom around checking for traps and clues and capes.

Illuminating the inside with UV light reveals 'AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR' on another wall—clearly whoever did this was expecting it—but the exterior of the warehouse seems to be quite empty of any clues.

"I think I've lost my appetite."

"You don't have to look."

"I'm not looking anymore, but I'm not sure I'll forget the scene so soon."

"Yeah."

"This is like some bad joke. If this is that fucking copycat they're getting better and better at imitating the Nine."