Glam sees the feeds and decides they don't strictly need to look.

Orders from above: stop opening doors, wait for reinforcements. Drupe, Dauntless, and PRT trucks are on their way.

Bots stop opening doors. Lorica waits.

The heroes and the PRT trucks arrive. PRT suits go in and explore the rooms she's already visited. After they've caught up, Lorica's asked to leave the building but have her bots continue opening doors while the heroes and the officers continue exploring the premises, more slowly this time, one apartment at a time.

Out Lorica goes. Bots open doors and scout for capes.

No capes. The same scene, repeated over and over again, with only the slightest changes. Whoever did this made some effort to be poetic about it: what could be lovers, what could be a mother and her child, what could be siblings, what could be friends and roommates. The corpses are hard to identify but all the live ones are tenants.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Glam echoes Lorica.

"This is so fucked up. We have a new psychopath in town."

"PRT and heroes aren't falling asleep, so it's apparently not something still ongoing, but then why are these people still asleep?"

"Drugs, sustained effect targeting them individually, something like that?"

"I'm kinda concerned that there might be something wrong there, like maybe some trap or something."

"Yeah, honestly they should be sending you in to spring anything in there but maybe they know something we don't."

"Well they don't seem to be actually touching anything other than opening doors and looking at things, but I'm gonna volunteer if slash when they decide to. It's kinda surprising that every apartment has two people, surely there are more than two people living per apartment here on average? Where's everyone else?"

"Probably nowhere good."

Eventually the PRT has examined all rooms in the building and found them all to be variations on the theme. No clue on where the missing people are. They ask Glam to fill Lorica's flock a bit more so she can try to extricate the people from under the skin-blankets simultaneously.

"You think it's more likely that moving one will trigger the others to do something than that moving them naively is a bad idea?" Lorica asks.

"Whoever set this up is unlikely to have thought we would do it simultaneously if they thought about it at all, and doing it sequentially means it will take longer to get through all of them and give whatever more time to have an effect, if it takes time. And they're civilians, getting them to safety and figuring out what's wrong with them is the priority."

"Okay." Bots poise themselves. "Say when."

One of the Glam-provided bots pops.

"When."

"Hang on, just lost a bot - Glam? You all there?"

"Yeah. That's weird, I can make another one—" Another bot appears in a nearby room.

Lorica steers it into place.

It doesn't disappear!

Another bot does, though.

And then another.

"Glam what the hell?"

Pop goes the bot they just replaced. "I'm not doing anything!" Pop goes another bot.

"Anybody else glitching? My diagnostics are all clean..."

"Everyone stay at their current stations. Report your observations," the PRT commander requests.

(Another Glam-bot disappears.)

"Nothing to report," says Dauntless from the hallway where he's standing guard.