"That would be very dangerous, not to do with your jacket open. The pensioner's mind isn't much for talking these days. The reactor is the only thing keeping him from going around like a bear that's been shot in the ass, and it's only working when it's working. There are enough problems here for the both of you to fix, and I'm not staying past my vacation." 

"Not starting a conversation with the reactor, got it. Anything else before we go?" Hopefully Ahti or Jesse has a map but if they don't Spot might.

"Don't you worry, I've left you clear instructions. You'll catch the end of the thread before I go to my vacation. The works on the task board here you can do later when you have time." He gestures to a corkboard, pinned to it is a clipboard with some papers visible in the clip. 

"Vacation. Right."

"Yes," Ahti replies, with iron in his voice. "No one's gonna cancel my holiday, or else sheaths gonna rattle." His expression and tone softens back to their usual look and cadence. "But don't worry at all. You'll take care of it, and soon this crisis gonna be last winter's snow. You two better go now so you don't have to run with your head as your third leg." He reaches into his back pocket and grabs something, handing it to Jesse. "The door in the back leads to the plant." He glances at Dairine. "Only one extra, but you should stay close anyways. Lotsa vermin in there, very dangerous." 

Jesse accepts the card and pockets it. "Yeah. Thanks, Ahti."

She looks at Dairine and sighs, scratching the back of her head with her free hand. "Okay, Hiss safety 101. You'll see some people who are sorta glowing red and look really nasty. When that happens, get behind me if you can, behind cover if you can't. I don't know how you usually deal with people trying to kill you but these ones have guns and some of them explode. —the people, not the guns. Oh, and sometimes there's people floating in the air whispering creepily. Don't listen too closely, but you can mostly ignore them. If you hit them they disintegrate and I haven't decided how I feel about that so ignoring them is what I go for. Questions?"

"Nope, that sounds fine. How about I set up a shield I can put over both of us if things get hairy? It should be able to handle regular guns no problem, maybe also the explosions if they're not really weird explosions."

"Will it let me shoot? That's kind of important."

"Yeah, one-way and transparent is no problem."

"Then let's go do some maintenance."

She heads for the indicated door.

Dairine stays on the other side of Jesse from the gun so as not to be in the way and chants in the Speech. There's a barely-noticeable shimmer around them both, and a sense of stillness like the air is moving a little differently, but no other sign of the shield going up.

Having someone to protect is kind of uncomfortable, but having someone protecting her is kind of nice. Unfortunately those two feelings don't cancel out into neutrality, and unfortunately her instincts don't quite believe the shield is really there. (The shield is really there, right?)

That's the most confused she can ever remember Polaris feeling, but, in its own way, that's actually kind of reassuring. Guess we're in this together, then, huh.

Okay. What's the situation out there?

The keycard opens the door that Ahti indicated, and through the door is a small alcove, and against the wall is a tall sign with directions, each stacked atop the other, five locations tall. 

To the left is "NSC Power Plant", "NSC Coolant Pumps", and "NSC Energy Converters". To the right, to closed door, the way they came, is "Janitor's Office" and "Ventilation".

In the leftwards direction up a few concrete stairs, the shelves and other equipment scattered through the hallway reflect an ominous red. 

Yup, that glow sure is ominous. Well, at least they're definitely going the right way!

Yikes.

Jesse proceeds cautiously toward the glow, following the "NSC Power Plant" sign. "So what happens exactly if that thing blows up?" she mutters, half to herself.

A now-familiar apparition appears before Jesse's eyes as information is added to her mind via the hotline, pieces of the new knowledge breaking into her conscious awareness, as her mind struggles to interpret the sudden addition, some of it appearing as sight and sound. Broken segments of a much larger diatribe pierce through the sounds of static: 

"...power..."

"explosion..." 

"too much..."

"Director's Duty..." 

"...keep the lights on."

Once the shadowy figure speaks his last and fades away, the full message is available to her, if she cares to look for it in her memories. 

She winces slightly and stops walking. "Hold up just a second," she says, "I need to listen to a message on the spookyphone."

The figure is still shadowy and indistinct, but clearer, despite the perspective shifting from further away to close to his face to one side to the other, leaving overlaying afterimages as her mind struggles to interpret the memory she now has, a memory clearly not made by her own mind. The sound is much clearer, though there is still the faint sound of a ringing phone in the background, just at the edge of her awareness. 

"Northmoor was Director before me.

I never wanted his job. I never wanted power. I purposefully avoided it, didn’t trust it, didn’t want to rely on it.

Northmoor was all about power. A man like an explosion, hungry for authority, for order, for more, until it was too much.

I had to find a solution in the end. Contain the situation. Northmoor never liked me, but he went along with it, to his credit. He didn’t really have a choice. I suppose, at the end of the day, a Director's most basic duty is to keep the lights on.

Here's to you, Northmoor. There were no Prime Candidates waiting in the wings. But I was there. Had been the whole time, keeping my head down, working my ass off. I had nothing to lose.

I picked up the gun almost on a dare."

Dairine waits and keeps a lookout, and when Jesse points her attention back at her sense data she asks, "What was the message? Was it from Ahti or is someone else in here?"

She absently rummages in her pockets, but fails to come up with anything to write the message down on. "Should've grabbed some paper from Emily... too late now, I guess. Um. Short version. Director Trench, who is dead, and used to run this place, sent me a message using the Hotline, a spooky magic phone. He was being really vague and ominous, as usual, but I think he was trying to tell me that Director Northmoor, his predecessor, is... the reactor. Or is powering the reactor, or something. 'A man like an explosion', 'all about power', 'a Director's most basic duty is to keep the lights on'. That's disturbing but I guess we already knew there was somebody in there, thanks to Ahti."

"Really powerful people who can only communicate in metaphors are so useful and so annoying. . . . What, uh, are the implications of the reactor being a dude, in terms of how to fix him."

"I'm... not sure. We already sort of knew it might be a person, I guess most of what we've learned here is... that it was a specific dude. Oh, and I think there was an implication that if the reactor stops working he might go off like a very big bomb and kill everyone in the building. So that's fun."

Should she try to tone down the bleakness for the twelve-year-old? ...nah. Twelve-year-olds can handle a lot of bleakness. She would know.

"Yeah, I had not been assuming quiet failure was on the table. Let's get moving again, yeah?"