She snickers again.

"You are objectively way sleazier than the lady from the Templars, and yet, I like you much more."

"Oh, well look who's popular! They try to get you with that whole righteous stick-up-the-ass bit? Good on you for not biting, you seem smarter than that."

"That's me. Destructive and cynical."

He laughs again, but it's a little more abrupt than it was before. Possibly he wasn't expecting that answer. "We're prepared to give you a chance to prove you've got what it takes to hang with the big boys and girls - to rule the world." He exaggerates the last words, making them overdramatic. "It's up to you to grab that opportunity by the balls." He takes another look around her apartment. "Based on what I've seen so far, you might be what I'm looking for or... you might end up dead. Time will tell."

He pulls out a business card from the inside of his jacket. "You have an appointment tomorrow in Brooklyn that I'd recommend you keep. There's no address. Consider this the commencement of your official interview. Find us." He turns to the still-open door, stops, turns back. "Or we'll find you. My client has eyes everywhere. I'd tell you not to be stupid, but it looks like you've already got the hang of that."

She grins at him as she takes the card, and manages not to blink at the acquisition of another sample for her library. It's easier to avoid reacting when it's not such a surprise.

"A treasure hunt! What fun!"

He clicks his tongue at her. "Later, 'gator." And then he's around the corner and gone, just like the Templar lady.

She giggles to herself and looks at the card.

Interesting, though, that both of them were visibly surprised by all the slime blood. It suggests that while the magic bees are routine, the alien slime powers very much aren't. She should probably take care not to make them obvious, then.

It has the location of a subway stop on one side and an elegant blue triangle logo on the other. It seems to be made out of heavier cardstock than most business cards usually are, but there's nothing else remarkable about it.

Very cute.

All right, time to go be in Brooklyn by tomorrow.

She makes another clone just because it turns out to be easier to do things when there are two of you, and packs a reasonable amount of things into suitcases like a normal person who isn't planning to live underground in a dark slimy cave. (None of her have found any luminous wildlife.) Then she buys a plane ticket. She decides not to take any eggs on the plane, but she does bring a lump of hardened Clay in disguise as a paperweight. Does she give a shit that she's abandoning her apartment? No, no she does not. All the stuff she actually cares about is packable. She does make an effort to have her Clay clean the place up a bunch; when she's done it still looks alarmingly grimy, but no longer like the site of thirty ritual murders.

Meanwhile, her clones cautiously dig in and extend their tunnel networks, duplicating themselves a few times for the extra brainpower and redundancy. She discovers that she can lose her connection to Tunnelers once they're out of life-sense range of a clone, but Clay functions as a very good life-sense relay if she lines all her tunnels with it, and the lost Tunnelers are just fine as soon as she gets them in range again. She also discovers, when she has her Clay eat a spiderweb with the spider still in it, that she can add to her library of cloneable creatures using Clay if the Clay eats the creature in question. That's... potentially useful, and also somewhat alarming. On the whole, though, she's still pretty happy with her alien slime powers. They're just so much nicer than the bee dream magic.

It would probably be useful to surround herself with a discreet army of cloned bugs, but she does not feel quite ready to go there just yet. Better to play it like she's just a normal magic bee person for now.

The utlity clone takes a bag of eggs and heads out to start another tunnel network, and the original Naomi lugs her luggage down to the airport and gets on a plane. The Clay left behind in the apartment flushes itself down the toilet. Interestingly, she can't feel it anymore once it gets out of range; apparently only her clones serve as actual network service providers for the Naomi overmind.

When she lands in New York, she decides to try something new. Can she modify the templates in her little library? An hour's concentrated fiddling gets her a Tunneler with an adult size not much wider than a fancy pen; she spends all night in her cheap hotel room laying eggs and sending out mini-Tunnelers to thread the city with tiny Clay-filled tunnels. (They come thirty to an egg, a tangle of tiny worms each small enough to curl up on the end of her finger without their little tails poking over the edge.) Then, bright and early the next morning, she cleans herself up and heads out to look for that subway stop.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a normal subway stop. There aren't many people out on the surrounding streets, but that could be because this looks like an industrial district. Or because it's six in the morning. Probably both.

From the stairs, she can see a gracelessly-aging laundromat, a hot dog vendor, a little kiosk that looks friendly, and a small fenced-off park with the gate standing open.

Hmm. Which of these places looks most conspiracy-like? She really wishes she had another clone active in the area, so she could have a second perspective if something happened to this one, but it's probably better not to run the risk of being discovered. At least she has her subterranean spiderweb of Clay to extend her life-sense range all over the city.

She buys a hot dog, even though she hasn't felt hungry in days. It's comforting. And it gives her something to do while she spies on everything in the vicinity.

The vendor, true to New York form, barely acknowledges her except to take her money and give her a hot dog. A few people mill about the streets, most of them having just arrived for work, a couple of them tourists (because no matter where you go in New York, there are always tourists). Some birds chirp in the park.

Basements aren't totally uncommon in New York, though there are significantly fewer where they might interfere with other infrastructure. The building that have basements in this area seem more or less normal, but her lifesense detects an office building's worth of people two hundred feet underneath that, which is decidedly not normal. To the east there's some kind of maintenance network that hangs off the sewer system; it doesn't actually end before her Clay cuts off.

Hm. Her tiny Tunnelers are mostly running on automatic; she directs a few of them to extend their tiny tunnels downward in the vicinity of the mysterious subterranean office building, to get a better sense of its layout. Then she strolls in that direction, trying to match sight to life-sense and figure out which building has the excessive basement.

Apparently, at least five of them; the place is massive, and actually extends out under the river to the northeast. The Tunnelers come up against the top of it at around fifty feet down, and when they do, there's a warning electric crackle a few inches out from the actual concrete.

If she looks closely enough, she'll see that same triangle logo graffiti'd on a couple of the buildings, usually accompanied by some kind of arrow or pointing hand.

Perhaps she and her hot dog should follow the arrows!

They'll lead her to what must be either the maintenance network or the most absurdly spacious sewer she's ever seen. The driest, too. The place is a maze, but the dead ends don't actually go very far, so it's easy to double back from them. A few presumably homeless people are dozing up against the walls or in piles of makeshift bedding; they glance at her but don't otherwise react when she walks by, even if she walks by more than once.

Conveniently, scattered along the brick tunnels are a few more triangle symbols, as though to reassure her that she's going the right way.

She finishes the hot dog before proceeding into the tunnels. Mini-Tunnelers divert away from the top of the underground complex and tunnel outward in search of its sides. Naomi follows the triangles, innocent as can be.

It's big.

...It's really big. It doesn't all stay on the same level, but she'll still reach what amounts to the front door of the place long before the Tunnelers find a part of it that doesn't just drop down fifty feet and keep going outwards. It seems to be arranged in kind of a pyramid shape.

Eventually, the sewer ends in an incongruously modern concrete structure. Just inside it is a wall proudly displaying the triangle emblem. Past that wall, there's an atrium lit with fluorescent lights, and then an archway in a tinted glass wall. Standing past that are four people in uniforms, all wearing gas masks and equipped with assault rifles. The two in front clearly notice her, but they don't say anything.

She strolls on in without a care in the world.

Immediately, several alarms go off. She has just enough time to be surprised at the sudden noise before the world spins and everything goes black.

Her lifesense shows a handful of people manipulating her unconscious body, dragging it from the entrance where she'd collapsed to a nearby room with several computers and some medical equipment in various cabinets. The person waiting in that room starts to their feet and starts bothering the people carrying her until they get her secured. Everyone leaves except for the guy who was in the room to begin with.

When she wakes up, she's strapped to a dentist's chair.

It's very unsettling to watch herself from an outside perspective.

So of course the first thing she says when she wakes up is, "Well, good morning to you too."

"Hey, a talking one! Cool," says the guy. He's holding a syringe, apparently for effect, because he puts it down immediately. "Okay, that'll make this easier, have you ever seen a psychiatrist or taken psychoactive drugs? Oh, uh, Benedryl doesn't count."

"Nope!"

"Okay, excellent. Uh, there's a lot of narcosynthetics in your bloodstream to fasttrack the rapport process, so make yourself comfortable before you lose motor function in your arms and legs." He picks up the syringe again, this time with a mad gleam to his eyes. "Is it safe?" he asks mockingly, before throwing back his head and cackling. Then he cuts it out and shakes his head. "No, no, I'm just fucking with you. I'm a reseacher, an exper-"

"Zurn!" a woman's voice interrupts him from the computer monitors on his desk. "My schedule is triple-booked, so get started ten minutes ago?" She sounds exasperated.

"Uh, yes, ma'am, Ms. Geary!" Zurn says hastily to the computer. He looks back at Naomi. "Illuminati, tsch. Am I right or am I right?"