Dairine finds herself in some form of maintenance area of a building, either underground or windowless. The room she's in appears to be large and made of concrete and tall, more than a story high. Some of the walls have a number of freestanding metal cabinets, while others have heavy duty shelving, which are covered with scattered tools and of spools of wire and metal pipe pieces and other construction or maintenance items. Several other similar shelves cut the room into sections.

Additionally, there are large metal pipes running up and across the walls, about as wide around as she is, and several smaller pipes pierce the ceiling and walls in various locations, running along them to meet and terminate at a small desk against one wall. A shelf of canisters stands to either side, and there appear to be slots where the pipes end for the canisters to be inserted. 

If she looks around further, she will find that the corridors leading off in various directions seem to have no consistent plan or layout, turning in one direction or another so that she cannot see very far down them. 

There is a metal door near where she's standing, and a bit further from that there is a sign on posts coming up from the floor, lit by an yellowy fluorescent. "Janitor's Office," it says in big block letters, with an arrow pointing towards the door. 

This is surprisingly Earthlike, but she did say at least one human. Also OMG they have a pneumatic tube mail thing, those are the bomb. She should figure out a spell to shrink herself so she can ride it like a roller coaster. But not right now, right now is for exploring! She'll go check out the Janitor's Office and say hi to the janitor if they're in there.

"Advisory," comes a voice from the computer she is carrying. "Environment contains a sound that may have deleterious psychotropic and physical and metaphysical effects. These effects will onset rapidly, beginning in approximately 17 seconds. Program ready to block this sound. Run program, immediately?" 

If she's listening carefully enough she might start to hear the noise that Spot is talking about, a susurrus of hissing resonating in the back of her skull, compelling and slightly painful, but it almost sounds like there are words in it, words she might be able to make out if she'll just listen a little bit closer... 

Aw man, she wants to know what the words are but apparently it's going to mess with her head. She should take her manual's advice, it's always good. "Run program!" Hopefully it doesn't block everything and make her totally deaf or whatever.

The resonating hissing sound stops, as does the pain in the back of her skull and the pressure on her temples. 

The sounds she'd been hearing before are muted, but not entirely blocked altogether. She can still hear her own footfalls, and the dripping of condensation from one of the pipes, but any background hum from a far-off generators and engines are practically unnoticeable. The noises she does hear sound like they're from further away and distorted, like at the end of a bad telephone connection.  

Any externally implanted desire she might have had to hear more of the noise instantly disappears when the noise and pressure does. Unless she had a lot of intrinsic motivation to find out what the words were, she very well might notice the sudden lack. 

She's still curious but not nearly curious enough to even consider disregarding an advisory from Spot. Probably it's like that story with the Sirens, where it's not all that cool really but makes you think it is. Back to exploring, now slightly deafer.

She has another minute, barely, to look around, before:

"Advisory. There appears to be an entity with an aversion to this unit's current form, and is exerting slow but considerable pressure on its internal workings. This unit may soon cease functioning in a violent fashion unless measures are taken. This unit is currently attempting negotiations with said entity to determine the proper format, but the pressure has not yet ceased. Increasing your distance from this unit to at least one meter may be a sensible precaution." 

Oh heck someone's gonna blow up Spot! She puts him* down and backs up and says, in the wizardly Speech which all things from stars to starfish understand, "Whoever is messing with my laptop had better cut it out right now!"

* If Spot has complaints about being thought of as a boy he hasn't mentioned them to her.

From behind the metal door comes a voice in an odd accent that Dairine will only be able to recognize in the Speech. "What is it that I am hearing out there? Come in, come in, take a load off, come in. Don't need to be shy." 

She opens the door, trying to look through it and keep an eye on Spot at the same time.

There is an older looking man in a blue janitorial outfit standing in the center of a room, his face cragged and back bent, holding a mop as he mops the wet floor. At the back of the room is a desk, and the room is sparsely decorated, but it's clearly occupied and used.

"Come in, come in," the man says, gesturing. "You are hear about the job? Janitor's assistant, yes?" He squints at her for a moment, then goes back to mopping. "They work so very young these days, they do. No matter, no matter. But you are late, too late, the position has been took." He pauses for a moment. "But perhaps she wants her own assistant. There is much to clean, much to do. She will be here soon. She can be asked then. Until then, no need to stand, come in, sit down. She can give you an interview herself when she arrives." 

Huh. Maybe there's going to be some kind of magic mess she needs to clean up, and there's another wizard already working on it. "Are you also a wizard? Do you know what's messing with my laptop?"

The man chuckles slightly. "No taikuri here, just janitor. Here to clean, not make rabbits for little kids." He pauses for a moment. "This building is old, newer things do not belong, not liked. 'Lap top' is too new, much too new. Something older, simpler, will be better." 

"Spot!" She calls out the door. "Search transformation library, parameters: self-targeted; origin form: computer; target form: book!" She knows wizarding manuals can be books, Nita's is a book, maybe Spot can turn into a book and back and not die.

There's a short pause. "There are millions of programs matching these parameters. Specify further parameters?"

"Additional parameter: will preserve your full functionality as a wizarding manual and/or mind!"

"Advisory: some functions may operate at reduced capacity. Specifically, verbal and auditory advisories and other outputs will be non-functional. Tactile notifications can be enabled with authorization?" 

What the hey is a tactile notification, is Spot going to turn into Braille? No time, deal with it later. "Acknowledged!"

"Transformation program, self-targeted, starting form: Apple IIIC+, target form: standard earth wizard's manual format. Additional stipulation: transformed object will retain current sapience and manual functionality. Run program?" 

She almost says 'Run program', but hesitates--"Will the transformation be reversible?"

"Most long-term transformation of sapient beings carries some measure of danger of permanent changes; intelligence will slowly change to match the form it takes, depending on the method of transformation. This unit's software and nature is more resilient than most due to its format and functionality. Permanent irreversible changes will likely not occur for several weeks, though some noticeable behavioral and instinctual changes may begin to affect this unit in no more than 16 to 32 hours. Warnings will be provided as changes occur. Advisory: this unit's physical form is currently under large amounts of pressure, it may not last much longer in its current format. Transformation is advised." 

"Run program!" She needs to get out of this place before Spot gets his brain scrambled, but not until she knows why she's here.

And with a soft rushing sound, where the computer once was there lies in its place a worn blue paperback book, with a faded symbol of a biteless apple emblazoned on the corner of the cover. 

New Spot gets scooped up and hugged and opened to a random page to make sure he's okay.

Spot's cover fuzzes under her hand when she picks it up, and when she opens the book to a random page the pages flip so that the book is open to the back cover. "Transformation Successful" and then underneath "Advisory: auditory output non-functional. Questions may still be posed verbally, but answers to questions and advisory warnings will appear here." 

"Are you okay in there?"

"This format is unusual, but sufficiently functional. Retransformation into this unit's previous format when circumstances permit would be advisable, but this unit should be functional for now." 

"Alright. Hang in there." She turns back to the janitor. "Sorry about the interruption. What's kind of mess did you need help cleaning up? And what's your name? I'm Dairine."

"Much to do, much to do, always much to do. Clear the clog, fix the reactor, burn the trash... talk to the plants." He chuckles at the last one. "Always much to do. But first we have very important job for assistants. Should wait for other assistant, first, she will help. She should be along soon, very soon. With two of you, job gets done twice as fast. Maybe I go to my vacation early." 

Waiting is not really how Dairine likes to operate but it's not like she knows where all those problems are and she does want to meet the other person. "You have a nuclear reactor down here? That's so cool!" Also she wonders what the clog is. Hopefully it's not a toilet, because any situation where a toilet needs magic done to it is already not great.

"Not a toilet, the pipes. Toilet much easier job, no magic, just plunger when the shit gets backed up. The clog always so clever, trying to sneak in. Probably trying to sneak in now when everyone's heads are elsewhere with all the ruckus and vermin. Got to clear it out before it gets in too deep. But fix the power plant first. Not, nuclear, someone much more dangerous than nuclear," he says. "Might go nuclear if it's not fixed fast, and then we can all throw the spoon in the corner."

"Hey, you just answered my thoughts! It's rude to read people's minds without asking. Also when you say 'someone more dangerous than nuclear do you mean the reactor is smart? I want to meet a reactor!" Apparently the clog is also smart and she wants to meet that too even though they sound like kind of a dick, but apparently there's a priority order. "If we need to fix the power plant in a hurry are you sure we should start by waiting for another person?" Oh no if he's reading her mind she needs to not think about anything embarrassing or secret like how Nita totally has a crush on Kit crap think about algebra. Algebra algebra algebra ax^2+bx+c.

Ahti chuckles softly and continues mopping the floor. "Not to worry, not to worry, she will be along very soon. Very soon now." 

The door to the maintenance office opens and a woman walks in, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a strange-looking gun in one hand. (It's pointed very deliberately at the floor.)

"Ahti!" she says, with obvious relief. "Great, you're here. Listen, the Board's been freaking out. Something about—uh, an 'Infiltrator/Emissary'...? Do you know anything about this?"

"You got the job," says Ahti with a craggy smile. "Well done. It's place for congratulations. I truly need an assistant." He tilts his head at Dairine. "While you were at interview, another one arrived, also here for the job. Very young, but very good. Eager. If you like, you can have your own assistant."

She spends a few seconds looking back and forth between Ahti and Dairine.

"...all right," she says eventually. "Sure." With a slight, quizzical smile for Dairine, "Hi, I'm Jesse."

"Hi!" says the tiny child. "I'm Dairine; I'm a wizard from Earth. Are you also a wizard?"

"...don't think so," she says. "I'm, uh. I'm not sure how to say this, but you look, like... twelve. Are you twelve."

"I will be, in like two months! But it's fine, I know what I'm doing. Apparently we're supposed to go fix a reactor before anything else, do you know where it is?"

"...I'm not sure how comfortable I am with having an assistant who's twelve. Given, uh," she shrugs vaguely in the direction of the office door, "the situation. —the situation, in case nobody's mentioned, is that this building belongs to a government agency that's being attacked by an evil noise from another dimension. I wouldn't exactly call it child-friendly." She wants to say 'no offense' but frankly if she were Dairine she'd be offended. Still. You gotta try.

"I have been to multiple galaxies. None of them were child-friendly and most of them had someone trying to kill me. Let's go fix some stuff and you'll find out whether I'm useful or not."

There is a pause.

"We should at least get you an HRA so the evil noise doesn't melt your brain. Unless you have something else for that. I guess I also don't know where to find a spare."

"Spot" gesture at the book "is dealing with that but if we do find a spare I guess it wouldn't hurt."

"I'll keep an eye out." She turns to Ahti. "Anyway, we need to get the lockdown lifted. Can you help me—us—get to the override?"

"Yes, yes. Easy peasy. It's just around the corner." He indicates the direction with a tilt of the mop. "But first we need to get both of you working! Very small couple of hours job." 

Something tells me it's gonna be more than that.

"Jahaa, jaa-a, you think there's a dog buried in this?" he says, smiling. "I can tell you are not yesterday's grouse's sun. That's why you're make a great assistant." He pauses for a moment. "Very well, I'll hit the facts on the table. Mä kyllä sanon perkele suoraan, että this house has a vermin problem, a bad one. They've already messed up the cooling pumps and power generators of power plant, perkele. And the pensioner inside is starting to feel the band around his head tighten. The situation needs to be fixed before the the plant blows up and we all disappear like a fart in Sahara, perkele." 

"So... fix the cooling pumps and power generators?"

"If the power plant has a mind I can talk to it. Will it be able to tell me what it needs?" If it doesn't have a mind she'll still be able to talk to it but it's less likely to have anything useful to say.

"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?"

"Yeah." She nods and resumes walking.

Jesse has just enough time when she rounds the corner to see a small metal elevator platform set into an alcove, before the light suddenly goes scarlet, and the alcove is blocked by a barrier of undulating red. 

With a whooshing sound, three beams of red light appear, narrow, and coalesce into three men in security guard outfits, their orange-glowing heads lolling to one side or the other. In unison, they rise slightly up in the air as they finish materializing, levitate the last few inches to the ground, orient on Jesse and Dairine, draw, and start firing their pistols. 

Dairine has been carrying the shield in the back of her mind like a song stuck in her head; now her fear reflexively pulls it into focus. The bullets slow like they've hit a lake of cold molasses and clatter to the ground.

When the light changes, she instantly scrambles for cover; she's not quite fast enough to get a shot off before their feet touch the ground, but it's close. She tries to focus on her aim and not worry too much about the shield slowing down her return fire.

Any bullets that are getting farther away from Dairine can go as fast as they like! She stays a few steps behind Jesse to avoid being in the way and stares at the glowing people in case this produces some idea of what the heck.

The guards continue to open fire on Dairine and Jesse, circling around them in opposite directions in an attempt to flank them. Dairine's shield is ignored as they fire, even though any bullets fired towards her simply slow and fall to the ground. 

Wherever Jesse shoots one of the glowing guards, there is a puff of multicolored smoke that explodes into short tendrils before fading away into the air, and when one of them is shot enough, their entire body is instantly transformed into an explosion of same multicolored smoke, which dissipates in but a few seconds. 

When there's only one of the guards left, there's another beam of red light, which forms into another figure. Their form is clearly human, but at the same time, it clearly isn't. The body is twisted, bent painfully in half, its stretched limbs and shredded clothing nearly scraping the ground as it slowly levitates closer to the pair. Its torso glows orange-red, growing brighter and brighter as it floats closer and closer to them, revealing the dark shapes of its ribs through its pale flesh. 

"Exploding guy!" says Jesse, scrambling back. "I think so, anyway!" She shoots the exploding guy. Several times.

Dairine also scrambles back, falls on her butt, and scoot-rolls to one side just in time to avoid Jesse tripping on her.

Several times is enough for the twisted figure to be sufficiently damaged by the bullets to fall to the ground. It glows more brightly for a moment, its shape distending, before it explodes, in a blast of force and sound and cracked concrete and a riot of multicolored smoke. 

The shockwave is enough to take out what remains of the last security guard, who dissipates just like the other two did. The barrier vanishes, and the red light disappears as well, as though it had never been. 

Dairine instinctively throws her arms in front of her face even though the shield handles the concrete fragments; the shockwave would have knocked her down if she wasn't down already.

Once her ears have stopped ringing, she realizes she's still sitting on the ground like a dumbass and gets herself vertical again. "Yup. Exploding guy. Thanks for the warning."

"I haven't seen a lot of them but they're... memorable."

She looks around. Which way to the power plant?

There's a sign by the elevator, with a pictogram intended to depict an elevator, with the caption "elevator" underneath. 

Underneath that pictogram and caption, the sign has two further lines of text. The first says "Ventilation" and is followed by the number "2" justified to the right edge of the sign, the second, below it, says "NSC Power Plant" and is followed the number "1". The box around the "2" is filled solid, to indicate the current floor. 

"So what were those guys? They looked like--like they used to be human."

"Yeah. I think they were, or—some of them were, or something. The evil noise did it."

"Ugh. Spot's blocking it for me but he can't do it for anyone else. What's your situation there?"

"I... also have something blocking it for me." It's just about the closest she's gotten to talking about Polaris since—well. Let's not dwell on that. "Everybody else around here who's not already screwed up seems to be wearing HRAs—I'll try to remember to point it out if we see anybody wearing one, so you can know what they look like—except for Ahti, who... I have no idea what Ahti's got going on, but I'm pretty sure the noise didn't get him. It's not... really subtle."

"I admit it would be worse if they could sneak up on us." She keeps moving toward where the reactor supposedly is, keeping an eye out for anything else weird or dangerous or for any useful signage.

At the bottom of the elevator is a largish storage room with a single other exit, and through that door... 

There is a very large open space, the ceiling quite very very high above, almost too far away to see. In the center of the room (if the curvature of the walls around them is the same for the whole room) is a large cylindrical object, with the markings "NSC-02" painted on with white paint through a stencil, with various pipes leading off of it in all sort of directions. Similarly stencil-painted letters adorn a large squat concrete structure forward and to the right of the doorway, with the faded words reading "NSC SECURITY". Further concrete structures and ramps are strewn haphazardly and sparingly throughout the room, at least as far as can be seen in the ominous red light spilling outward from the center of the room. 

Just in front of the entrance to the SECURITY structure, at the bottom of a ramp, there is figure with a large weapon standing there, their features somewhat difficult to discern from so far away. Above and to the left of her, on the top of some other concrete structure, there is another figure with a similar-looking weapon, walking from one end of the structure to the other. 

"I think I see HRAs..." she says, squinting. "Those chest harness things."

"I can't tell but at least they're not glowing or shooting at us."

"Both good signs. Let's see about getting closer."

As they approach, it's more obvious that the figure is in fact wearing an HRA, and she's not glowing at all. 

"Hey, are you new?" she says, as they get closer. "Go talk wi-" she stops short, before lifting her weapon and pointing it at Dairine. "Who are you two, and what are you doing here?" 

"My name's Jesse Faden," says Jesse, stepping protectively in front of Dairine. (A slight, easily missable sigh before she continues,) "I'm the new Director. I'm here to fix the reactor."

"The new director?" She lowers her weapon for a moment, but then lifts it up again. "Ma'am, if you would step aside please. I'm not sure what the entity behind you is, but it's probably dangerous, and it isn't supposed to be here." 

Huh, so Jesse's like officially in charge of this stuff instead of just passing through like Dairine. "I'm Dairine, I'm here to help Jesse fix things. You really don't need to shoot me?" That wasn't supposed to come out sounding like a question.

"She's with me," Jesse says firmly, in the tone of one who will NOT be letting anyone shoot her twelve-year-old today. "I picked her up in Maintenance; the janitor said she'd make a good assistant."

She clearly wasn't expecting that. She frowns and lowers her weapon slightly, though she keeps her eyes trained on what appears to be a 12 year old girl as she speaks. "That's not really standard operating procedure ma'am, but, you're the director. We're already dealing with one crisis today, though," she adds, trailing off meaningfully. When that doesn't get an immediate response, she lowers her weapon a little further. "Well, if you're here to help, you should speak with Chief Arish in the security booth. He's been handling things here." 

"Thanks."

She heads for the security booth and keeps herself pointedly interposed between Dairine and the lady with the gun as they pass.

Inside the room is a man standing in front of a set of computer banks, he turns when he hears the sound of the door opening. 

"Ma'am! Hey! Chief Arish, FBC Security. Shouldn't you be in a safe room?" Then he notices Dairine, and his eyes narrow and his hand moves to his sidearm. 

"This is Dairine, she's with me," says Jesse, once again stepping between the kid and the person threatening to shoot the kid. "We're here to fix the reactor. What can you tell me about that?"

Dairine attempts a little friendly wave from behind Jesse and tries to look human.

"Yeah, yeah, look, I'm not sure who the both of you are or what you're doing here, but you need to get back into a safe room, now. I'm sorry, I know you might want to help, or just go home, but it's really dangerous out here right now. We'll sound the all-clear when this is over." 

Okay, time to once again say the thing she hates saying. "My name's Jesse Faden, I'm the new Director. If I don't fix this, I'm not sure who will. What can you tell me about the reactor?"

"Look, ma'am, I don't have time for-" he pauses for a moment, his demeanor shifting. "Oh hang on, you're the new director? Sorry, ma'am. It's, it's a pleasure." 

"Let's skip the formalities, please."

"Right. Faden. Ma'am. Look, as you can see, it's a bit of a shi-- er, a bit of a disaster down here. We've been holding our ground, but whatever's gotten into our buddies has them wrecking the coolant pumps and the power converters. The NSC keeps overheating and my crews keep getting shot before they have a chance to make any repairs." 

"NSC?" She's seen the signs, but nothing that explained what it stood for.

The thing where everyone suddenly changes their minds about Jesse when she says something without any actual evidence is kind of weird but adults are just like that a lot of the time. The good news is that it sounds like there are some people who know nuclear science around here and they just need to protect them from getting shot.

"Sorry. Bureau jargon. It's what we call the power plant: you know, the big rumbling metal thing?" He chuckles. "Salvador, Head of Security, asked me to protect it in case of an attack. See what's inside is, dangerous. Dr. Darling seemed to know it'd be a target."  

"Darling?" Also a name she's heard, but also without a ton of context.

"Yeah, he's Head of Research here at FBC. He came down a few days ago before everything went, um, sideways. He was out of it, and smelled like, um, like he'd had too much of the sauce, if you know what I mean. He was ranting about vulnerabilities and how he had only one 'large scale HRA', but that he needed it somewhere else. Still, at least he gave us these personal HRAs before he left." Arish steals a confused glance at Dairine for a moment before turning back to Jesse. "Hey, did I mention that, um," he glances at Dairine again. "Well, nevermind. Darling's always been a bit strange, a bit par for the course when you do research at a place like this, of course, but he was acting much stranger than usual. Crazy dude." 

(Darling knew the Hiss was coming. Now there's an unsettling conclusion.)

"Listen, I love playing 20 questions as much as the next guy, but we have got to get the water and electrical systems repaired before this baby blows. I'll have my guys unlock the doors out of here for you, and we'll make sure your um, friend gets somewhere safe so you don't have to keep track of her."

Okay, so either Darling was smart and foresight-having orrrr he was somehow responsible for the Hiss and trying to fix what he screwed up.

"I should go with Jesse. I'm a lot more use in a fight than I look, and depending on what's wrong with the reactor I might be able to help fix it better than you could. I'll show you what I mean if you promise not to flip out."

Arish glances at the girl again, then back at the new director, his hand drifting to his side. "Ma'am, you said she was with you, right? Who, or what, exactly is she? We don't exactly get a lot of visitors under the age of 18 here, and she's not wearing an HRA." 

"I found her in Maintenance. Ahti, the janitor, told me she'd make a good assistant. So far he's not wrong."

His hand relaxes at the mention of Ahti, but he's still cautious. "Look, a recommendation from Ahti certainly counts in her favor, but this is a very secure facility. There's still the question of how she got here in the first place. If there's any risk of her being connected to whatever's going on here she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything critical. And it's far too dangerous out there anyone to be babysitting a kid, director or no director, um, ma'am. She'll be better off in a safe room until you get all this cleared up." 

"I'll take your advice into consideration," she says; and then she reviews the words that just came out of her mouth, and sighs, and changes tacks. "Look, no offense, but right now I trust Dairine more than I trust you. She's new around here? So am I. Got in somehow despite the lockdown? So did I. No HRA?" She gestures, silently, at her own unencumbered chest.

"If I start flying will you admit I'm not just a random kid who needs protecting or would that freak you out worse?"

Arish turns to stare at the girl for a moment. Then he sighs and puts up his hands. "Look," he says, "You're the director, if you want her with you, it's not like I can stop you. But just because you have your own weird director, um, stuff going on, doesn't mean anything else you run into should get a free pass. More often than not, the weird stuff in here is dangerous, and she definitely counts as weird. Be careful."

He turns back to Dairine. "I'd stay on the ground when any of my men are around. If someone sees you doing that they might shoot first and ask questions later, and the radios aren't working so I can't exactly warn them about you in advance." 

"Noted." Whatever gets you and your basically reasonable but weirdly directed and very annoying paranoia out of our way, dude.

"Okay, unless you have anything else you think I should know before we head out to the reactor, I think we should go." She doesn't actually wait for Arish to say yea or nay to this before she turns to leave.

He glances over at Dairine for a moment before shaking his head. "Just, get the reactor fixed before this whole place goes up. Oh, and if you find my boss Salvador out there, can you please ask him what the plan is? I'm sure he will have one by now." 

Dairine follows Jesse getting-things-doneward.

Getting-things-doneward is such a good direction.

Is there handy signage? Arish said they needed to clear out the areas around the coolant pumps and electrical systems, right? Are those by any chance neatly labeled to make them easy to find?

The obvious way forward is up the ramp just outside the security structure. Heading up the ramp, there's some signage towards the center of the room, though a bit far to read from this distance.

Halfway up the ramp, though, there's a familiar looking tape circle on the floor, and

Thanks.

"Let me just..."

She goes up to the tape circle and puts her hands on the floor near the middle.

There's a pause where nothing happens, then a whooshing sound and a sudden pulse of compressed air, knocking the reflector dishes around the tape circle out of alignment. One of them slowly tilts and falls over. 

There are no other obvious changes. 

She gets up and dusts herself off. "Great, let's go. Coolant pumps and electrical systems, right? Let's see what the signs say."

"Oooh, what was that you just did? It felt like something but heck if I can put it into words."

"Those things," she gestures back at the tape circle, "are control points. I can sort of... fix them, when I find them. I don't know exactly how it works, I think it's a Director thing. It... helps, visibly, to fix a control point if there's Hiss around, it makes everything less... spooky and bad. There wasn't any Hiss around this one but I think doing the thing still helped."

She nods. "Always good to be on good terms with the building you're in."

"Especially when it's this one, yeah."

Speaking of which: the signage?

The greenish sign is placed up against the center pillar of the room, and has four locations listed on it. 

The sign indicates that NSC Coolant Pumps is to the left, and NSC Energy Converters, Central Maintenance, and NSC Control Room are to the right.  

"Coolant Pumps first?" she suggests.

"Sure. Do you know how to repair nuclear reactors or are we just going to clear out any awfulness so other people can do it or do I need to be figuring out spells for it?"

"Well, the guy did say he had crews waiting to go in, plus Ahti said he left us clear instructions. I figure it'll work out one way or another."

"It usually does." Onward to coolant pumps!

And how are the coolant pumps this fine unspecified time of day?

The way to the coolant pumps takes them a good third of the way around the large cylinder in the center of the room, before they're met with a very very large pipe, with the helpful label "cooling water" and an arrow on it every six feet or. A ramp leads down from the concrete structure they are standing on, and on either side of the ramp are raised platforms with railings overlooking the area the ramp leads to. There are hastily abandoned forklifts and giant pipe sections and other materials strewn about on the floor and on top of the raised platforms, but off in the distance, about 20 yards away, there is a large green sign, almost like the kind you see on the highway, with the words "NSC COOLANT PUMPS", with an arrow pointing down, towards a doorway in the outer circumference of the room. 

About halfway across the floor, half a dozen beams of red light congeal all around them, and there are six twisted and bent and stretched human-ish bodies in a loose pattern around them, their shredded clothing dragging across the floor as they levitate towards the pair. 

Gaaaaaah the exploding ones are the WORST. She does her best to take them out before they can get close.

Dairine plays defense again. She's getting better at staying in shielding range but out of tripping range of Jessie, though her shield is still not great at blocking the shockwaves when the exploding ones explode.

The shockwave does not discriminate between friend or foe, and as such the twisted humans fall relatively quickly, as one explosion can easily set off a second, if the second is close enough and damaged enough. It doesn't take long before they're all defeated. 

No new entities coalesce, yet. 

"Great," she mutters, as her gun resettles into its inert form at her side. "...thanks for the help. It's easier with backup." Not that that's going to make me feel any better if I get this kid killed.

Onward and pumpward?

Onward and pumpward! Dairine contemplates potential refinements to the shield spell that won't result in their air getting cut off and also whether it's worth trying to talk to the coolant pumps or whether the reactor as a whole is too likely to be either sick and grouchy, or just an asshole. She's talked to her parents' printer and getting it to admit it has a problem and accept help is an entire thing.

Through the door a little to the left on a slanted wall is yet another sign, with directions to points of interest. NSC Power Plant is to the right (back the way they came), and NSC Coolant Pumps and Furnace Chamber are to the left. 

The hallway to the left slopes downward slightly, and then flattens, leading a metal-barred gate, beyond which is an ominous red glow. The rest of the room is full of various tanks and equipment. 

As they walk down the ramp, the building shakes and shudders, and a box above the door is jostled loose. The box bounces and slides a few inches before coming to rest, and the gate slides shut before they even have a chance to get close. 

Power cut. Replace the parts.

The voice comes from nowhere, sourceless, but it's clearly Ahti's. 

The box blinks, the yellow lights on its surface turning on and off in a rhythm, and the metal part above the door where it was recently attached blinks its own yellow lights. They are almost, but not quite in sync, and slowly getting more and more out of sync in the way things that have very nearly but not quite the same periods do. 

...ah. She's gonna have to do the thing.

She extends a hand toward the fallen box, and her will with it. The box levitates. As usual, her fine control... isn't. "I really hope I'm not about to break anything," she says, and chucks the box at the socket.

When the box gets close to the receiver, the box twists suddenly, and the face most closely oriented to the wall jerks into alignment with the socket. It snaps into place with a satisfying clang, and the lights on the box turn a solid and unblinking green as the door slides back open. 

"How does that work? The thing you just did."

"I'm... not totally sure. There's objects, with powers, and when I save them from the Hiss, I get their power. That was the one for throwing things. It's usually a lot more destructive. I haven't had it for long, I'm still getting used to it."

"Neat. Can you talk to them?"

"Not exactly."

"What's it like instead?" she asks, poking her head through the now-open door.

"I get... feelings, impressions. I'm not sure how to describe it. I'm not sure I'm not imagining it."

It's difficult to tell exactly what the room looked like originally, as right now its construction is overrun with an eruption of concrete blocks, most of them the size of a human or larger, sticking out of walls and floors and stairs and balconies and each other. Some stairs are still partly functional, from the perspective of the door, the room looks almost like a very steep amphitheater or stage, with everything sloping downwards (as viewed from a distance, as everything is at right angles to the floor, and quite haphazard,) until it reaches a small circular area in the center of the floor, which is flat and devoid of blocks. 

Suspended above the the center are several human figures. It is difficult to tell exactly what they look like in the blood-red light, but all of them are clearly wearing military outfits. Dairine's head poking through the doorway doesn't appear to have affected them. Yet. 

"Bad news in there?" asks Jesse, who has a worse vantage than Dairine at the moment. She has a guess about the answer; she's already readying her weapon.

"More floaty guys and also the walls sprouted a lot of little baby walls. They're not moving right now though. The guys or the walls either."

"Great, okay, let's do this."

She steps into the room, shooting at the floaty guys on the assumption that they're going to drop and start attacking. They tend to do that.

Dairine shields and gets ready to levitate them both if the walls start getting up to some shit.

They do in fact drop, and immediately open fire, as best they can from the bottom of the room. Shooting at that angle is somewhat ineffective, though. 

Then one of them throws a grenade, landing in between the two of them. 

Jesse tries to telekinetically throw it back, but she can't quite get a grip on it, maybe because it's so small or maybe because she's so stressed out by its presence. She vacates the immediate vicinity, letting loose some words along the way that she would perhaps prefer not to be using in front of a twelve-year-old.

It's okay, Dairine already knows all those words. What's less okay is that she also runs directly away from the grenade, which means Jesse ends up out of range of the shield.

The grenade explodes, spraying a large chunk of floor in the air as dust. 

Without the shield the rangers will be able to do significantly more damage to Jesse, though they are still having trouble shooting at both of them from their position down in the middle of the room. They are soon aided, however, by the appearance additional grenade (thrown at Jesse), a couple of twisted human figures (near to Dairine) and a levitating half-naked humanoid (floating above the center of the room) who appears to be capable of tearing chunks of masonry from the walls and tossing them at Jesse and Dairine. 

Aaaaaaaaa that's too many things! Dairine starts trying to run more or differently away, then remembers the levitation idea and launches herself into the air with a stream of Speech, which makes her a very visible (albeit still shielded) target but gives her the freedom of maneuver to move toward Jesse again. In fits and starts, because she does not want to find out whether her shield can tank an entire giant chunk of masonry at once.

Floating in the air appears to at least partially stymie the twisted humanoids, which circle ominously around one another directly below Dairine. But it does make her a much better target for the soldiers on the ground and the shirtless one in the air, which promptly turn their attention to the much more exposed target. 

The bullets are as ineffective as before, not that the entities seem to notice, but the chunk of wall and exposed rebar currently hurtling at Darine's head very well might not be. 

Swoop dodge try to end up in the vicinity of Jesse despite not having enough time to accurately track Jesse's location!

The dodging means that the blocky boulder of concrete and metal does not hit Dairine's shield head-on, but at an angle. 

There is quite a bit of momentum in the makeshift projectile, more than the shield is rated to handle. Most of it ends up in the walls and floor, as it was designed to do, but the excess bleeds off into Dairine directly, and given that it was at an angle, she finds that her swoop has considerably more spin than she might have intended. 

It does carry her much closer to Jesse, though, if Dairine is able to notice this with the room spinning rapidly around her. 

She'll notice! . . . eventually. First she needs to stabilize, which she does by landing in a crouch that turns into what looks like an incompetent attempt to breakdance but does get her into the room's reference frame. Now where is Jesse and did she get shot because Dairine fucked up.

Jesse is... having her own problems.

Dairine makes for a great distraction, and the intensity of combat is great for making her nearly impervious to the guilty voice in the back of her head scolding her for letting a twelve-year-old draw fire on her behalf, so all in all she's taking down the Hiss fairly methodically with only occasional brief breaks for internal screaming.

Except.

That fucker up there, the one that keeps throwing things, can dodge. It's incredibly obnoxious. She's seen the same pattern before and it was obnoxious then and it's obnoxious now. She's trying to take advantage of his distraction, but he keeps nipping out of the way of thrown objects at the last second, then throwing things back at her which she has a lot more trouble dodging.

All of which is to say that when Dairine sees Jesse, she's just in the middle of being lightly clipped on the shoulder by a chunk of concrete. They can be buddies!

Oh good Jesse's still upright and moving! Love to be upright and moving. And if she runs right over to Jesse then they'll both be under the shield again.

Good things about this situation: Jesse is shielded and not suffering the guilt of making a child be her distraction in combat.

Bad things about this situation: The Hiss can concentrate fire on both of them undistracted now, and the shield still isn't rated for those chunks of concrete.

Jesse tries to focus on the flying throwing dodging guy, because he's the biggest threat as long as nobody's threatening to explode on her. Nobody's threatening to explode on her, right?

The twisted humanoids aren't exactly intended to be stealthy, but what with all the other distractions, it seems that they went unnoticed until Jesse took stock of everything around her. Now that Dairine is on solid ground once more, rather than circling underneath their inaccessible target, they're once again slowly floating closer to her, and are getting concerningly close. 

She tries a spell to hold the stealthy floating guys still. If it works she can try extending it to the dodging guy.

Once the spell takes effect the twisted humanoids almost immediately come to a stop just a few feet short of Dairine. They continue to push forward, and are held back by an equal and opposite force. 

The dodging guy has significantly more luck in avoiding the spell effects -- the quick swoops seem to confuse the spell logic some, and the opposing force has a tendency to stop them a very short distance into his dodge and knock them too far back in the other direction, only to stop them from going the other way. This leads to some highly erratic movements, the center of which moves very slowly in one direction or another. But while this still makes the entity harder to hit than a stationary enemy, the dodging knocks them into bullets most of the time, and so the issue very quickly becomes moot. 

Once that entity is wrapped up, and the exploding enemies are shot, the rest is very easy to mop up. 

In the center of the floor, where the enemies were fighting, is a familiar-looking tape circle, surrounded by reflector dishes and other equipment, most which have been toppled or knocked aside by the recent hostilities.  

Time to do my job, I guess.

She puts her hands in the middle of the circle and focuses.

There's a pause, and an angry noise in the air, as clouds of dark multicolored smoke writhe and churn. 

Then a pulse of air and force, and the air is empty of smoke and red -- the ruddy light is dispelled and the unnoticed oppressive feeling in the room suddenly disappears. 

The blocks of concrete sticking out from each other and the walls and ceiling and floors retreat back and away, forming seamless surfaces despite the previous misshapen existence. Among other things, a large doorway is revealed, making it as a way to the NSC Coolant Pumps. Several previously hidden very large blue pipes travel into the wall above the door, and branch off into the room they're in in various directions. 

"That was immensely cool," Dairine pronounces with the confidence of an authority on immense coolness. "Were you communicating with the building, or just acting on it?"

I can't exactly tell her you're doing most of the work.

"Not sure," she says. "I... guess you could say I was scratching its back. Helping it do something it couldn't do by itself. I could be wrong, though. I don't have a good way of knowing how the building feels about it."

"I could try talking to it. After we fix the reactor." Because Dairine is a mature adult who does not get distracted from important jobs by talking to everything.

"After we fix the reactor," she agrees, smiling slightly. "First things first."

Okay. NSC Coolant Pumps, here we come?

Through the door is not more brutalist concrete building, but an underground cave corridor, appearing naturally formed. The ground is rough and uneven, and covered in dirt and dust. Blue pipes follow along the slightly twisting passageway for a hundred feet or so before the dripping and narrow cave walls give way to a larger, more open area, full of metal scaffolding and even more pipes. 

As they approach the metal structure, there is a muffled bang, and the ground slightly jerks under their feet, along with the walls and the ceiling and everything else. The world shakes for but a moment before stilling, dust falling from the ceiling as the muted rumbling of the shockwave affecting all the rooms around them fades into the distance. 

"...don't like that," she comments quietly.

"Me neither." She doesn't stop walking.