System Wars: Here Comes the Heroes!-Chapter 30: Body Cam Analysis

The best and worst thing about big cities is that they never sleep.

Whether it's at a time when the sun is shining and beaming down over a bustling populace going about their day or at a time when the moon is out and acting as the only source of illumination for people who can't sleep, there will always be some portion of the city that will be doing something.

Even a condemned apartment building can serve as a hub for all sorts of activities.

Like, say, the clandestine activities of an international secret agency, for example.

...

On a city street located three blocks away from a sewage treatment plant was an abandoned hotel known as the Grand Jameson Hotel.

Once upon a time, this hotel was once considered the rival to the famous Ritz Carlton Hotel and was even slated to replace it as the shining example for grand hotels everywhere.

However, a couple of bad business decisions, an insurance scam involving the mafia, several drug busts, and some badly placed bets had turned the grand hotel into an abandoned lot that hadn't been of use to anybody for a little over 80 years.

In other words, it was the perfect spot to establish a safe house.

Driving up to this abandoned lot was a strange graffiti-covered van that was simultaneously very memorable and incredibly forgettable. Then again, that might've been due to the cognition hazards that were hidden in the patterns of the graffiti.

Once the car was fully parked, a man and woman exited the vehicle in order to take a closer look at the building before them.

If one were to see their expressions at this time, they would notice that the latter looked decisively unimpressed while the former just didn't give a shit.

"Are you sure this is the place? It looks like a dump," the woman complained while staring at the obvious signs of desecration and rot.

"That's the point," the man assured his counterpart as he opened up the van and pulled out a silver briefcase. "Also, since we're here, we don't have to refer to each other by codenames anymore."

"D'awww, I was kind of growing fond of being called Porcupine," the woman teased with a smile.

This unusual couple were known as Agent Armstad and Agent Olben, and these two were sent by a secret organization to the city of San Francisco for a singular purpose: to investigate the new System, its sole User and what kind of "offshoots" the System was capable of producing.

"So, do you have a key to open this haunted hotel up or nah?" Agent Armstad asked as she noted the heavy padlock on the front.

"You know we don't need something like that," Agent Olben answered as he pulled out a weird cybernetic rod from his pockets.

"I know, but still."

With a press of a button, the rod began to remold itself until it resmebed a key that looked to be a perfect fit for the padlock that kept the agents out of the hotel.

"Ya know, I think I said this about a million times by now," Agten Armstad complained while Agent Olben opened the lock, "but I think it's kind of bullshit that none of our gadgets are sound-based."

"If you want to mount a mission to steal from the Noise Maker, be my guest," Agent Olben chided as soon as he removed the lock from the front door.

"Yeah...no. I don't have my ears and eyeballs exploding in my head."

Entering the hotel's lobby, the agents were greeted by the smell of dank wood, various types of fungi, and the sound of squeaking rodents running away from the unexpected humans.

"Wow, it's actually worse on the inside than outside. Honestly, I'm impressed," Agent Armstad joked while doing her best to not jump at the sight of a rat's corpse being devoured by a colony of ants. "Please activate the cleaning thingie now."

"I am," Agent Olben answered while opening the briefcase and extracting a gadget that resembled a high-tech puzzle cube.

"Now then, if I remember the instructions correctly, I just need to do this...then this!"

A couple of button presses and twists later, Agent Olben tossed the cube down to the ground, which then began to emit a bright green laser scanner that was accompanied by an artificial voice.

[Scanning room...scan complete.]

Updat𝒆d fr𝑜m freewebnøvel.com.

[Cleaning the room and activating the ultrafabricator function now.]

The transforming puzzle box retracted it's scanning light before switching over to a strange blue-colored light that swept through the hotel lobby and literally swept up all of the dust and grime in an instant.

The puzzle box then retracted it's scanning tools before opening and exposing a blue swirling portal to the outside world.

Plink, plink, plink!

Moments later, several high-end computers, electronics devices, and significantly better pieces of furniture came out of the portal and filled the newly refurbished hotel lobby.

"Wait a minute... where's the mini-fridge?" Agent Armstad asked once she saw all furniture get expelled from the box.

Plink!

"Ah, there it is."

Once the high-tech puzzlebox finished transforming the abandoned hotel lobby into a respectable safe house space, Agen Armstad immediately took the opportunity to flop onto a refurbished couch and extract something to drink from the newly minted mini-fridge.

As for Agent Olben, he made sure to recover the cube before getting to work.

Making his way to one of the work computers, Olben pulled out the memory cards that Armstad stole from the cops and immediately plugged them into one of the reader slots.

"Alright then, let's see how different these heroes are in comparison to the demons and mechs," Olben mumbled to himself as he waited for the computer to extract the video files from the memory cards.

Seconds later, Agent Olben found himself staring at the still video frames of a knight in shining armor wielding a huge shield and a cowboy armed with a pair of wicked-looking revolvers.

"Huh...that's new," Olben commented at the images.

"Hmmm? What's new?"

Hearing her colleagues unusual comment, Agent Armstad got off of the couch in order to see what had ellicit such a response.

"What's got you-oh!"

Evidently, she was caught off guard by the exact same thing as Agent Olben.

"Wasn't there only supposed to be one of these guys?" Agent Armstad asked.

"Yup."

"So...where did the cowboy come from?"

"I don't know..."

Prior to this exact moment, Agents Olben and Armstad were given a mission briefing that detailed they were going to be doing an in-field investigation of an unknown System and its user, as well as any familiars, also known as "offshoots" within the organization, that have been produced as a result of this newly formed contract.

They were well aware of the knight in shining armor calling themselves Platiknight and had already keyed their instruments in picking up any electronic signals that had managed to cross this unusual offshoot's path. Hence why they were able to ambush those cops and steal their body camera footage.

What they weren't expecting was the presence of a second one of these offshoots coming in the radically different form of what they can only describe as an exaggerated depiction of a cowboy from a Wild West movie.

In all honesty, they couldn't tell if they were more shocked at the cowboy's appearance than at the fact that he existed in the first place.

"Wait, so do we report about this new familiar or just leave it and focus on Platiknight?" Agent Armstad asked. "Because the former isn't our main focus while the latter is."

"Well...that cowboy is either an indicator that there is actually more than one User of this new System, or that the User in the report has more than one familiar," Agent Olben concluded. "So either way, we should probably complete a full analysis first."

After coming to this conclusion, Agent Olben proceeded to activate a special program that began to breakdown the footage of Platiknight and the unknown cowboy and analyze every single bit of data that they could.

Beep!

The first bit of information that they managed to retrieve was the name of the cowboy.

"It appears the name of this cowboy is...Tin Star," Agent Olben read aloud. "Odd name, but I think it's supposed to be a reference to US marshals, if I had to guess?"

"Right, the whole tin badge thing," Agent Armstad nodded. "I vaguely remember seeing those in those old cowboy movies...huh. You think it's a coincidence that both this guy and Platiknight are familiars whose existence seems connected to metal?"

Beep!

"Judging from the fact that our program just determined that both of these offshoots are connected to the same user, probably not," Agent Olben replied.

"Well, ain't that convenient timing..."

For the next few minutes, Agents Olben and Armstad continued to watch the computer as it continued to provide them with more and more data on the familiars recorded on the body cam footage.

As this process continued, Agent Armstad decided that now was the time to ask a question that she had always asked on every other instance where the agency sent them to investigate a new user.

"So...do you think this new user will be as psychotic as the rest?"

Normally, Olben would answer "yes" or "probably."

This time though, he answered with something different.

"Honestly, I don't know."

"Huh...well, that's refreshing."