Continuation from Through the Web and set in the Prismaris Universe from FreijaFoxy
Part 1/3
The bullpen of Major Crimes had quieted into the strange half-life that always settled over the SCPD after sunset. The frantic daytime rhythm of ringing phones, shouted updates, and exhausted detectives stumbling between desks had thinned into something lower and duller, like the city itself was trying to catch its breath before the night shift inherited the violence.
Most of the overhead lights had been switched off to save power after the latest city budget cuts, leaving only lone islands of fluorescent white hanging over occupied desks. The rest of the floor disappeared into pockets of shadow and amber light from computer monitors. Somewhere near the elevators, an old printer coughed and rattled like it was dying out of spite.
Detective Mara Quill sat at her desk with one elbow propped against the armrest and a stack of reports spread around her in organized disorder. The paperwork never ended in Silver City. It simply changed costume.
Property damage assessments from a supervillain fight downtown. Insurance coordination requests after a teleporting burglar had accidentally phased half a jewelry store’s inventory into a bakery wall three blocks away. Civilian witness statements describing events with the kind of spectacular inconsistency only panic and superpowers could produce.
One report claimed a man had exploded into bats.
Another insisted the bats had been holograms.
A third claimed there had never been bats at all, only "a hostile goth presence".
Quill had stopped questioning these things years ago.
She typed steadily, glasses slipping slightly down the bridge of her nose as she updated entries in the SCPD’s metahuman database. Most of the information had been forwarded by Voss earlier that afternoon after a coordinated operation involving a vigilante called Hushwing. Alias updates. Known associates. Behavioral patterns. Jurisdiction conflicts with the Harbor District.
Routine ... or at least as routine as anything involving capes ever became.
The cursor blinked across the monitor while she filled out another incident cross-reference. Her fingers moved quickly, almost mechanically, the result of years spent converting chaos into documentation before it could dissolve into rumor.
Then her eyes drifted upward.
Just a few lines higher in the database.
HARLEQUIN, RUBER - ACTIVE STATUS.
Quill’s jaw tightened before she even consciously processed the name.
It was subtle. A small clench near the hinge of her mouth. The kind of reaction nobody unfamiliar with her would ever notice. She exhaled slowly through her nose and leaned back slightly in her chair, forcing herself to look away from the entry.
Professional and detached.
Just another case file.
Her fingers resumed typing, but a thought had already lodged itself somewhere behind her eyes and refused to leave.
After a few seconds, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen lit her face pale blue in the dim bullpen.
A hidden folder opened behind two passcodes and a deliberately misleading app icon. Inside sat several grainy images captured during the Red Web attack on the charity gala the previous week. Harlequin, partially obscured by motion blur and smoke, slipping through crowds dressed in wealth and diamonds while the city’s elite screamed and security systems collapsed around them.
The photos were terrible.
Which somehow made them worse.
A shoulder turned slightly toward the camera. A flash of white gloves. The outline of a grin hidden beneath theatrical lighting. Not enough for identification.
Enough to be irritating.
Enough to feel personal.
Quill zoomed in again even though she already knew it would reveal nothing new.
That was when her eyes flicked toward the small text attached beneath the encrypted transfer.
Date.
Time.
Location.
Rainbow Coffee.
The meeting was tomorrow evening.
For several seconds she simply stared at the words while the room hummed quietly around her.
The whole thing bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
On paper, this should have been ordinary. Informants were part of the job. Anonymous tips, hidden meetings, burner phones, encrypted drops ... Major Crimes practically ran on people selling pieces of truth for money, revenge, protection, or ego. Quill had met informants in parking garages, laundromats, cemetery entrances, abandoned restaurants, and once inside a moving city bus because the source claimed stationary vehicles were "government behavior".
Compared to those, a coffee shop almost felt insulting, but this informant was not ordinary.
Nothing about the situation was ordinary.
She tapped her thumb once against the edge of the phone as the memory replayed itself in fragments.
The distorted voice hijacking her private frequency during the gala attack.
The timing, the knowledge they should not have possessed.
The way the caller had spoken about Harlequin not like a rumor or a target, but like someone describing a mutual acquaintance.
Worse still was the aftermath.
Quill had immediately pushed the data to SCPD cybersecurity after the gala ended. She had expected difficulty. Anonymous routing, spoofed calls, encrypted relays, that was standard fare.
What she had not expected was panic.
The department’s resident cybersecurity genius, a twitchy insomniac named Rivera who looked physically allergic to sunlight, had initially been excited by the challenge. Then increasingly confused. Then irritated. Then alarmingly quiet.
According to Rivera, tracing the signal had been like trying to follow a ghost through a maze made of mirrors. Every node led into another firewall, every address rerouted through dead companies, abandoned servers, or identities that simply did not exist. Fake names. Fake registrations. Fake countries.
And then Rivera had finally managed to punch through one layer.
Just one.
The retaliation had been immediate.
A security system bearing the unmistakable signature architecture of Dynamo Industries had descended on his intrusion attempt hard enough to nearly brick his workstation. Forced disconnects. Data wipes. Counter-intrusion measures sophisticated enough to make SCPD’s systems look prehistoric.
Every recovered trace vanished.
Gone.
No logs.
No residue.
No trail.
Dynamo Industries publicly denied any involvement, of course. Their legal department claimed their systems had likely been exploited as another rerouting node by unknown third parties. Technically plausible.
Quill did not buy it for a second, but the problem was that suspicion without proof meant nothing.
And she had built her entire career around remembering that distinction.
Her fingers slowed slightly on the keyboard.
Outside the precinct windows, evening had begun bleeding across Silver City. The last sunlight stretched between skyscrapers in bands of molten orange and red, reflecting off glass towers and rain-stained streets far below. Neon signs flickered awake one by one as daylight surrendered the city to its more honest hours.
Quill finally looked up toward Voss’ office.
The blinds were partially open. Light spilled through the glass walls in pale rectangles across the bullpen floor.
She could see him inside, still working.
Of course he was.
Major Investigator Kellan Voss sat behind his desk with his sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms, one large hand resting against a stack of paperwork while the other turned pages with slow, methodical precision. He looked exactly the same as he had six hours ago, which was unsettling in its own way. Most people wore exhaustion openly after a day in Major Crimes.
Voss absorbed it like concrete absorbed rain.
Quill watched him for a moment longer than she intended.
She should tell him.
The thought arrived with immediate, unwelcome clarity.
Not because procedure demanded it, though technically it did, but because Voss was her partner in every way that mattered professionally. Harlequin was not just her obsession. The task force belonged to both of them. Every lead, every angle, every pattern mattered.
And if this mysterious informant truly possessed insider information on Harlequin …
Then hiding it from Voss was dangerous. Her jaw tightened again.
But another thought followed immediately behind it.
Would Voss approve of the meeting ?
No.
Not the real version of it.
Not if the source was as buried and suspicious as Quill suspected.
Not if the source demanded something in exchange.
Voss tolerated informants the way surgeons tolerated infection : sometimes unavoidable, always dangerous. He had no patience for manipulative negotiations or people attempting to leverage investigations for profit. If an informant asked for too much, Voss cut them loose immediately, no matter how valuable the lead seemed.
Because to him, compromise spread.
Slowly and silently, like rot inside walls.
Quill understood that philosophy and usually she agreed with it.
But Harlequin had been slipping through their fingers for months now, leaving behind embarrassed departments, gutted security systems, public spectacles, and smiling messages carved directly into the city’s confidence.
This lead mattered too much.
If there was even the slightest chance it could move the investigation forward, she could not risk Voss shutting it down before she understood what it was.
The realization sat sour in her stomach.
Lying to Voss felt wrong in a way she disliked examining too closely.
So instead, she kept typing.
Hours slipped past in the quiet rhythm of paperwork and fluorescent lights. Detectives filtered out one by one until only a skeleton crew remained scattered across the floor. Somewhere nearby, someone reheated terrible noodles in the breakroom microwave, filling part of the bullpen with the smell of artificial broth and regret.
Eventually Quill shut down her terminal and gathered her things.
Her shoulder ached faintly from sitting too long. She rolled it once beneath her coat, then made her way across the bullpen toward Voss’ office.
The door was partially open.
Voss glanced up as she stepped inside.
Paperwork covered nearly every available surface of his desk in neat, controlled stacks. Unlike Quill’s organized chaos, Voss’ workspace looked like evidence prepared for trial. Precise. Intentional. Dangerous to disturb.
"Going home", Quill said, carefully casual as she leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. "I’ll see you Monday ?"
Voss studied her briefly before nodding once.
"Sure."
His eyes dropped back toward the file in front of him, though only for a moment.
"By the way", he added, "did the cybersecurity guys recover anything from the call you got at the gala ?"
Quill felt her spine stiffen almost imperceptibly.
Voss continued turning a page as he spoke.
"Strange that the entire conversation disappeared from the records", he said. "Not everyone has that kind of technology."
A very dangerous thing about Kellan Voss was that he rarely sounded suspicious, he simply sounded observant.
Quill kept her expression neutral through force of habit more than comfort.
The truth was she had been careful after the gala. Extremely careful. She had only told Voss that the unknown voice had warned her the others needed help in the main hall. She had omitted the rest of the conversation entirely.
At the time, it had seemed temporary.
Now it felt uncomfortably close to deception.
Luckily for her, or perhaps unluckily, depending on perspective, the mysterious caller had erased the original communication logs completely.
"No", Quill replied evenly. "Cybersecurity got nothing. All the data’s gone. Whoever pulled that hack knew what they were doing."
Voss gave a small shrug.
"Mm."
But his eyes lingered on her for a few seconds longer than necessary.
Not accusing or pressing.
Just watching.
Voss always watched like he was fitting tiny pieces together behind the silence.
Then, eventually, he returned to the paperwork.
Quill forced herself not to leave too quickly.
"Have a thrilling weekend with your mountain of reports" she said dryly.
"One of us should."
That earned the faintest twitch near the corner of her mouth. Then she stepped back into the hallway and pulled the office door shut behind her.
The bullpen suddenly felt colder.
Quill walked toward the stairwell with controlled, measured steps, but tension coiled tighter beneath her ribs with every floor she descended. Her mind churned with overlapping thoughts, each one feeding the next.
The meeting.
The erased records.
Dynamo Industries.
Harlequin.
Voss.
The worst part was not the secrecy, it was the guilt. Because a small, unpleasant part of her suspected Voss had noticed more than he let on. And if he had, he was now doing something far more dangerous than confronting her.
He was waiting.
Venatrix stood with her arms crossed so tightly across her chest that the segmented limbs folded behind her back gave a faint, irritated twitch every few seconds. The chitin of the spider legs reflected the sterile laboratory lights in sharp lines, their pointed ends clicking softly against the polished floor whenever her temper threatened to slip through the cracks. Across from her, Dr. Vivian Chambers remained completely still behind the glow of a translucent tablet screen, her pale eyes scanning lines of information while her fingers moved with precise, almost surgical rhythm across the glass.
The underground laboratory around them felt less like a workspace and more like the inside of some enormous machine. Everything was spotless. White walls, silver fixtures, sealed cabinets without visible handles. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and ozone, with the constant low electrical hum of hidden systems vibrating beneath the floor. There were no windows to the outside world. Only reinforced glass partitions looking into neighboring rooms filled with equipment sophisticated enough that Venatrix could not even begin to name half of it.
For several long seconds, the only sound in the room was the tapping of Vivian’s fingers.
Then the scientist finally spoke.
"I see."
Her tone remained perfectly neutral, almost cold enough to disappear into the sterile air itself. She continued reading for another moment before lowering the tablet slightly.
"This is … a complication" she said at last. "But nothing you cannot fix."
Venatrix felt one of her spider legs flex sharply behind her.
A hot reply climbed halfway up her throat before she forced it back down again. It was her failure. She knew that. Losing the core had been catastrophic, especially after all the preparation, all the resources, all the risks that had gone into acquiring it in the first place. She hated hearing it reduced to a "complication", but she hated even more that Vivian Chambers had the power to say it so casually.
There were dangerous people in Silver City. Crime bosses. Enhanced mercenaries. Rogue heroes. But Vivian Chambers belonged to a different category entirely. She was not loud enough to be feared properly. Not immediately. The danger sat beneath the surface with her, hidden under calm posture and clinical detachment, like a scalpel resting quietly beside an operating table.
Venatrix had learned very quickly that becoming useful to Vivian Chambers was far safer than becoming inconvenient. To a point.
Without another word, Vivian turned away from her tablet and approached one section of the pristine wall. A concealed panel slid open with mechanical smoothness, revealing a recessed compartment hidden behind it. Inside, a circular platform rotated slowly before stopping with a soft click.
Resting atop it was a compact device roughly the size of a large tablet, though far thicker and heavier than any consumer electronics Venatrix had ever seen. Its dark metallic surface was interrupted by glowing blue lines that pulsed softly like veins beneath skin. Several antenna-like protrusions folded along its sides, and a circular radar display rotated faintly across the center.
"I have something here" Vivian said.
She lifted the device carefully from the compartment and held it out.
"This can detect high concentrations of energy. As long as the core is not shielded inside reinforced containment or a properly insulated vault, this should allow you to narrow its location."
Venatrix raised an eyebrow as she stepped forward to take it.
"How narrow ?"
Vivian glanced toward her.
"Approximately five kilometers in diameter."
Venatrix stared at her.
"That’s your idea of narrow ?"
"It is the limit of what current technology allows" Vivian replied flatly. "You are welcome to invent something better."
Venatrix exhaled slowly through her nose and looked back down at the device. The radar display swept in steady intervals, emitting faint pulses of light across the screen. It was advanced, no question there, but five kilometers in Silver City still covered entire districts.
Still … it was better than nothing.
As she adjusted her grip on the scanner, her eyes drifted upward for only a moment toward the room beyond the reinforced glass wall behind Vivian.
And immediately wished they had not.
The adjacent chamber was smaller than she expected, cramped compared to the immaculate laboratory surrounding it, but every inch of it was packed with technology. Towers of servers blinked in shifting colors. Mechanical arms hung from ceiling tracks. Workbenches overflowed with half-assembled machinery, strange prototypes, weapon frames, and exposed circuitry. The place looked less like a laboratory and more like the den of someone who had stopped distinguishing between invention and obsession years ago.
Then her gaze landed on the figure seated near the back wall.
At first, Venatrix thought it was a person.
A woman, perhaps. Human-shaped. Motionless in a chair beneath suspended surgical lights.
But then she noticed the open torso.
Metallic structures filled the cavity beneath the synthetic skin. Mechanical ribs. Bundles of cables. Artificial musculature threaded with glowing lines of energy. Thick cords disappeared from the figure’s spine into nearby machinery while one exposed arm hung limply beside the chair.
Venatrix looked away immediately.
A small, involuntary breath escaped Vivian behind her. It was subtle. Barely audible.
But Venatrix heard it.
Interesting.
She kept her expression carefully neutral as she shifted the radar device under one arm instead.
"Most of my best people are in jail right now" she said, deciding not to acknowledge what she had seen. "Thanks to the little performance at the gala."
There was bitterness in her voice now, harder to suppress than before.
"It’ll take time to get them out. Lawyers, transfers, leverage … that kind of machinery doesn’t move overnight."
Vivian simply watched her.
"In the meantime" Venatrix continued, straightening slightly, "I’ll handle this personally".
The scientist gave a slow nod.
"See that you do".
She gestured faintly toward the scanner in Venatrix’s hands.
"Do not disappoint me again, or our arrangement becomes irrelevant."
The words were not spoken loudly. They did not need to be. Venatrix felt the warning settle into the room like frost.
Vivian returned to her tablet, though her eyes lingered briefly in thought before she added, "I will inform you if additional information regarding the core surfaces. I may also be having an … informative discussion later this week."
Venatrix narrowed her eyes slightly.
"With who ?"
Vivian’s gaze flicked up for half a second.
"That is not currently your concern."
Which meant it absolutely was a concern, but Venatrix was smart enough not to push further.
Instead, she gave a curt nod and turned toward the exit doors. The laboratory suddenly felt even more suffocating than before, the cold white walls pressing inward with every step. She hated coming here. Hated the silence. Hated the feeling that every object in the room was more expensive than entire neighborhoods above ground. Most of all, she hated the unsettling certainty that Vivian Chambers understood things no normal person should understand.
The doors slid open soundlessly.
Outside waited the elevator corridor, dimmer and far less sterile than the laboratory itself. Venatrix adjusted the strap of her bag carefully after placing the scanner inside, making sure the device remained protected before stepping into the waiting elevator.
As the doors closed, she leaned back lightly against the wall and let out a slow breath she had not realized she’d been holding.
Something about this place always left her tense.
Not because she feared violence. Violence she understood.
But none of this felt human.
The elevator began its ascent.
Or at least, she assumed it was ascending.
That was the problem with these meetings. No matter which hidden entrance she used, abandoned subway maintenance rooms, sealed utility corridors, forgotten basements beneath unrelated buildings, she always somehow arrived at the same underground laboratory.
And it made absolutely no sense.
The elevators themselves were too small. The timing never matched the distances involved. Sometimes the trip felt too short. Sometimes too long. Once she had counted nearly three minutes of descent despite entering from a district whose infrastructure maps showed no underground systems remotely that deep.
It was impossible.
Venatrix rubbed lightly at one temple.
No.
Not worth thinking about, that path led nowhere useful ... what mattered now was the core and the thief who had stolen it.
As the elevator continued upward through hidden layers of Silver City, Venatrix slowly rested one hand against the bag containing the scanner, her jaw tightening again.
Somewhere out there, someone had taken something that belonged to her.
And she intended to get it back.
Iris walked quietly through the evening streets, her hands buried deep inside the pockets of her coat as the cold wind curled through the narrow roads of the neighborhood. Above her, broken lamp posts flickered weakly against the darkening sky, their failing lights casting uneven pools of pale yellow across the wet pavement. Every few steps, shadows stretched and warped around her as another bulb buzzed, dimmed, or sputtered back to life with exhausted reluctance.
The district had always been rough around the edges, but lately it felt like something was slowly bleeding out beneath the surface.
A grocery store sat dark behind metal shutters covered in old graffiti and fading flyers. Half the signs in the windows had curled from rain exposure, their promises of discounts and reopening dates long outdated. Further down the street, an empty restaurant stood abandoned with chairs still stacked upside down behind dusty glass, as though the owner had stepped out one evening and simply never returned.
Across the road, construction barriers blocked off an entire intersection where repairs had supposedly begun nearly a month ago. Orange warning lights blinked uselessly beside unmoving machinery while puddles gathered in the cracked asphalt between them. Nobody ever seemed to be working there anymore.
Silver City loved its shining towers downtown. Loved its heroes flying between skyscrapers and its polished charity galas and glowing advertisements.
Neighborhoods like this were where the light stopped reaching.
Iris lowered her gaze slightly and kept walking.
In another part of the city, someone like her might have drawn attention immediately. The green antennae hidden beneath her hat twitched faintly whenever cold air slipped through the fabric, and even behind tinted glasses, the shifting rainbow hues of her eyes occasionally caught reflections in strange ways.
But here ?
People minded their own business.
That was one of the reasons she stayed.
No one looked too closely at anyone else when everyone was already carrying too much.
She turned into a narrow alleyway between two brick apartment buildings, her boots splashing softly through shallow puddles left behind by the afternoon rain. The walls here were lined with old pipes and rusted fire escapes, the air smelling faintly of damp concrete and distant cigarette smoke. At the far end waited a battered metal door with peeling paint and a broken intercom that nobody had bothered repairing in years.
Iris unlocked it quietly and slipped inside.
The apartment building groaned softly around her as she climbed the stairs. Old plumbing rattled somewhere behind the walls. A television played faintly through a neighboring apartment. Someone coughed two floors above her.
Familiar sounds. Grounding sounds.
By the time she reached her apartment door, some of the tension in her shoulders had eased.
She stepped inside and locked the door behind her immediately out of habit before removing her coat. The small apartment was modest to the point of near emptiness, but warm. A secondhand couch sat beside a cluttered coffee table covered in receipts, florist invoices, and handwritten notes. Near the window, several potted plants occupied nearly every available surface, their leaves spilling toward the dim city light outside as though trying to escape the apartment themselves.
The faint scent of soil and flowers lingered pleasantly in the air.
Iris paused for a moment after hanging her coat, listening instinctively to the silence around her.
No movement, hidden footsteps or strange sounds.
Good.
Only then did she head toward the bedroom.
The room itself was small, barely large enough for the narrow bed pressed against one wall and the old dresser beside it. Clothes hung neatly from hooks near the closet, while several sketchbooks and loose papers sat stacked beside the bedframe. The only unusual thing about the room was the section of brick wall near the corner.
Iris knelt beside it carefully.
Her fingers moved automatically toward one particular brick, loosening it with practiced ease before sliding it free from the wall. Hidden behind the opening sat a reinforced metal box wrapped in cloth.
She pulled it out slowly and rested it on the bed.
For a second, she simply stared at it.
Then she opened the lid.
Blue light spilled softly across the room.
Among other technological gadgets, the core rested inside exactly where she had left it, its surface glowing with shifting pulses beneath transparent layers of crystalline material and metallic structures too intricate to fully understand. Thin currents of energy moved deep inside it like veins of liquid lightning, illuminating Iris’s face in pale electric blue.
The colors reflected in her rainbow eyes as she stared down at the object in silence. Even now, after several days, she still did not truly understand what she had stolen, only that everyone else seemed to think it mattered.
A lot.
The Red Web had launched a massive operation to retrieve it during the gala attack. Not a discreet recovery team, an outright assault.
That alone told her the thing was valuable beyond anything she normally dealt with.
Usually, the stolen goods she fenced were straightforward enough. Rare jewelry. Illegal tech. Sensitive files. Experimental components from corporations that deserved to lose them anyway. Things she could quietly break apart and move through contacts without too much attention.
But this ?
Nobody wanted to touch it, not even her usual buyers.
Especially not after seeing it.
One of them had actually backed away from the table and told her to get the thing out of his shop before he "ended up inside a black bag". Another had refused to even look directly at it once she mentioned where it came from.
That worried her more than she wanted to admit.
Iris reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, angling it toward the glowing core before taking another picture. The soft click of the camera sounded unusually loud in the quiet apartment.
She looked at the image for a moment afterward.
A single object.
Enough money to change lives, potentially.
Enough to keep the shelter downtown running through winter. Enough to restock the food kitchen two streets over. Enough to help families who had started pretending they "weren’t hungry tonight" so their kids could eat first.
Her jaw tightened slightly.
That was the problem.
Every time she considered getting rid of the core entirely, she thought about those people again.
The little girl she had seen last week wearing shoes patched together with duct tape. The exhausted single father who kept apologizing for "taking too much soup". The old baker two blocks over who had quietly admitted she might lose her shop before spring.
People always talked about heroic battles saving the city. But hunger lived longer than supervillains did.
Iris sighed softly and rubbed one hand over her forehead.
"I really need to sell this thing …"
The words barely rose above a whisper.
Carefully, she lowered the phone and placed the core back inside the box. The blue glow disappeared beneath the lid, plunging the bedroom back into its dim amber lighting. She slid the container back into the hidden compartment behind the wall and pushed the loose brick carefully into place again until it blended seamlessly with the others.
Then she sat there quietly on the edge of the bed for several seconds, staring at the wall.
Somewhere in Silver City, people were searching for that core with armies, mercenaries, hackers, and god knew what else. And it was currently hidden behind a loose brick in a tiny apartment above a failing neighborhood grocery store.
The absurdity almost made her laugh.
Instead, Iris leaned back slightly and looked toward the rain-speckled window of her apartment.
She had to keep trying.
Someone out there had to know what this thing was worth.
And hopefully … someone willing to buy it before the people looking for it found her first.
Cast :
Venatrix and Dr. Vivian Chambers from EannDelacroix
Kellan Voss and Mara Quill from Kateb_VonShoat
Iris from kind_koala