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1.09 - Fragments

Night time, a bedroom in a typical suburban home. A man and his wife lie in bed, sleeping peacefully.

Suddenly there is a terrific BOOM. Shelves rattle; pictures fall off the wall; car alarms go off up and down the street. The man sits bolt upright in bed. "What the hell was that?" he asks out loud.

He gets up, struggles into a bathrobe, and pads through the house to the back door. Outside, a dog is barking like mad. The man steps out into the back yard and looks around. There is nothing unusual. Car alarms are still wailing, and some of the neighbors' windows are lighting up, but otherwise there is nothing unusual at all.

"Quiet, Farley!" he tells the dog, and goes back inside. A moment or two later, Farley starts barking again.

Cut to the next morning. A black van pulls up to the curb across the street from the house. The NextWorld logo is painted across the side.

Cut to inside the van. Two operatives, a man and a woman, sit in the back, staring at a complex array of electronic equipment.

"Is this it?" she asks.

"The signal's here," he says, tapping a screen. "Right in this guy's back yard. You ready?"

"Ready as ever," says the woman, and she pulls a taser from her satchel and jams it into the man's side. He grunts and goes down. The driver of the van scrambles for his seatbelt, but she tasers him in the back of the head before he can get himself free. She dumps him in the back and slides into the passenger seat. Then she leans her head back and closes her eyes. A few seconds later, her ghost slips free of her body and exits the van.

The camera follows her as she crosses the street and passes through the backyard fence. The camera lifts up, over the fence, and pulls back in a wide crane shot, revealing a huge, smoking crater that fills the entire back yard. The crater is strangely transparent, however, as though it were superimposed over a normal yard of undisturbed grass. When the woman steps down into it, she appears to be "wading," chest-deep in the ground.

At the center of the crater, she stoops and picks something up. It is a fragment of masonry, pitted and weathered except for one side, in which is carved rows of strange heiroglyphs.

Cut to a nearby gas station. The camera moves in on a pay phone around the side of the building. Seemingly of its own accord, the receiver falls off the hook and dangles by its cord. From it comes the sound of someone dialing a number.

Cut to a close-up shot of a telephone sitting on a desk in a darkened room. It rings once, and a hand picks up the receiver, then moves out of frame. A woman's voice, distant and tinny, says: "This is King's Horse reporting to King's Man. The eggshell is in hand. I repeat, the eggshell is in hand."

The camera pans up to reveal Kate Hennisson holding the receiver. "Message received," she says. "Initiate transfer immediately." She hangs up.

Cut to black.

The artifact.Three days ago, a spectral artifact fell from the sky over one of the City's quieter residential neighborhoods. Its impact was violent enough to propagate partially into the material world, causing a loud audible disturbance and a brief tremor in the surrounding area. A NextWorld team was immediately sent to investigate. One of the operatives on the team was actually an Orpheus Agent named Angela Delafont. Agent Delafont subdued her fellow NextWorld teammates and procured the artifact — a heavy stone tablet with strange hieroglyphs carved into one side — then contacted Kate Hennisson to arrange its transfer to Orpheus Group.

Agents Morrisson, Herschler, and MacMillian were assigned to the case. Hennisson provided the briefing. The Agents were to meet Delafont in a parking garage downtown, and there receive further instructions. One Agent would be required to remain in body and carry a PDA. Herschler volunteered.

The Agents met Delafont at the parking garage as planned. Delafont had projected, and used her Inhabit emanation to imprint the artifact's current location directly onto the PDA's memory. Before she could give them further instructions, however, the Agents were ambushed by four NextWorld operatives wearing Kirlian goggles and wielding guns loaded with "ghost shot." Delafont, sensing that her physical body was in danger, immediately ripcorded.

Herschler was struck in the head by a rubber bullet. He fell and dropped the PDA. The NextWorld operatives immediately moved to acquire it. Agents Morrisson and MacMillian were able to hold them at bay using a combination of Keening and Morphose (MacMillian manifested physically as a swarm of giant hornets), but Herschler was forced to shoot one operative in order to recover the PDA. The Agents escaped in Herschler's car. Two black SUVs gave chase, but Morrisson and MacMillian used Beckon to disable the drivers, and the Agents were able to return to Headquarters without further incident.

At Headquarters, the Agents handed the PDA over to Jimmy Spengler to decode the instructions Delafont left on it. Kate Hennisson was extremely concerned for Delafont's safety, and ordered Spengler to access her GPS locater chip, which she'd had implanted subdermally before going undercover. The Board of Directors, however, sent word that no rescue effort would be authorized until the artifact was safely recovered. Although clearly frustrated, Hennisson agreed that the artifact was a higher priority.

According to the instructions left on the PDA, the artifact was stashed in a rent-a-locker in the City's central subway terminal. The Agents left immediately. Herschler and MacMillian were nearly exhausted after the incident at the parking garage, and so remained in body. Agent Doug Sands could not be reached, so Senior Agent Walter Hanley projected and went along to provide backup.

The Agents arrived just as a team of heavily armed NextWorld operatives entered from the opposite end of the subway platform. The operatives used smoke grenades to clear the area of civilians, then opened fire with ghost shot. Agent Morrisson was badly wounded, but managed to reach the locker first after Hanley used Pandemonium to accelerate his local timeframe. Morrisson reached through the front of the locker and grabbed the tablet. He then ripcorded back to Headquarters, while the other Agents staged a quick retreat.

When the others arrived, they discovered that Kate Hennisson, in direct defiance of the Board of Directors' orders, had put herself to sleep in a projection creche and gone to rescue Delafont alone. She succeeded, but was herself captured. Now Agent Delafont was safe and in body at Orpheus Headquarters, while Kate's body remained in cryogenic suspension, her spirit hostage to unknown captors.