Chapter 2-55: Flagrant Violation of Safety Laws (1/2)
Cameras there, there, and there. Cheap set up, not even moving, fixed arcs of coverage. Fooling electronic eyes wasn’t all that hard, especially at night. Now, the vibration sensors they’d planted in the ground could have been bad, but they weren’t counting on a master lightfooter invisible after taking a sip of a Potion coming in across them at thirty-five mph, using an eight-foot branch as an easy vaulting pole. She cleared the ten feet of fence and barbed wire without a problem, hit the ground, rolled to lose the momentum smoothly while sliding smoothly out of the arc of coverage as the branch dropped to the ground on the other side of the fence.
The smell here was bad, enough to make the eyes water... no wonder so many of the people went masked. There was bad shit in the air. Happily, her Diamond Vajra was filtering out the fumes from the breathable air, so all she had to worry about was not stepping in the caustic shit lying in pools on the ground. Since staying an inch above them was totally fine with her, she began to slide through the shadows towards her goal... a walled compound set slightly off from the other buildings, which her Compass was pointing directly towards.
The condition of these buildings was pretty bad, with badly applied paint trying to cover up the rust from caustic materials and fumes. It was all a big freaking accident waiting to happen... and maybe that was entirely the point.
Well, they wouldn’t still be pumping if their plans were complete, she thought, and looked at the unsteady ladders on the sides of the things, and wondered just what she might find up top.
She touched the metal, feeling the turgid mass of the chemicals within - this was one that stored their fracking chemicals - although she was pretty sure whatever this compound was, it was a bunch more than a fracking compound, and no way was it ‘cheap’.
She shimmied up the ladder like a monkey, grimaced at the sight of the rust on the top of the tanks, and slid across it very carefully, tremblesense letting her know just how badly these tanks were having it from the stuff down below.
Well, maybe she could end their suffering...
She pulled out a strip of testing paper, and calmly and carefully unsealed the monitoring hole at the top of the plug in the center of the tank. She waved the strip through the fumes that wafted out thickly the instant it was unplugged, and quickly put the cap back on.
She studied the mélange of colors stealing across the testing strip, her lip rising as the strains and mixes of elements revealed themselves to her.
Yeah, no fucking way this wasn’t pure industrial waste being shoved deep into the land. Gods knew what the long-term effects of this shit were...
But those combinations of Energized hydrocarbons and other excitable stuff could be enticed to do other things...
She pulled out her field kit from her Masspack, staying in the shadow of the plug as it deCompressed and became visible. Knowing right where everything was, she opened it up, put the side holders out, the main holder back, picked up an empty syringe vial, and calmly began to sprinkle some rather energetic oxides together in them, stirred them together in the prescribed pattern of two-four-three ratios forwards and back with the aquae that would carry them, and when the grey-silver mixture was sparkling properly, stoppered it.
She calmly closed up the field kit again, re-stowed it in her Masspack, and pulled three vials of Alchemical Fire out of it in return. She deftly punctured the seals on all three vials with the syringe, and the syrupy red stuff slumbering inside turned an interesting color of pink... and began moving a lot more excitably.
A paperclip made a decent hook, holding the first vial upside down, exposing the seal directly to the toxic fumes coming up from below, the cap barely askew.
Smiling, she turned, and broke into a sprint.
She reached full speed well before she reached the edge, and threw herself into the air. Covering the sixty feet between the two tanks was not at all difficult, as she discharged her Focus to help her slide through the air twice as far as her arc of travel should have allowed. She hit the rusting top of the next tank, slid across it smoothly, and skated right up to the center plug.
She wrenched open the monitoring cap, and repeated the trick with a second vial, then raced to the next one to do a third.
If she had the corrosiveness of that stuff down, it was about ten minutes or so before the seal was eaten through, the plug popped, and some volatile stuff tailor-made to have puppy-kittens with that toxic sludge was going to meet its ideal amour, and there would be fireworks, and many children running about happily...
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She was over the side of the tank, down its ladder, and moving through the compound with the sureness of the invisible not worried about being seen, the scentless not being sniffed, and a lightfooter not being heard... especially with the celebratory fire going off in that compound.
Trusting in her triple array of Skills (and a really good Stealth modifier), she clawed her way up the fifteen-foot block walls and popped her head over the edge.
Six werewolves, and six of the unnatural slime-skinned things with smooth heads and no lips.
All of the werewolves were in hybrid form, with two of them absolutely massive in size, had to be massing nearly as much as bears. Damn, took Levels in Greater Werewolf, they did!
Without clothes restraining them, the malformed and mutated nature of everything there was apparent. The werewolves had lesions, mismatched limbs, distorted musculature and bones, spikes, multiple tails, enlarged tusks or fangs, eyes actually glowing, oversized talons, and similar popular mutant additions to themselves.
The Aberrants had combinations of scales, leathery hides, spikes, and rubbery flesh, none of which looked healthy. Arms were sometimes just tentacles, bones all optional, but fearsomely clawed, just like the needle teeth lining their lipless mouths, and their empty black eyes.
None of them were identical, none of them were symmetrical. She couldn’t recall seeing anything like them before, but it didn’t really matter to her.
Mutated werewolves, some with advanced Racial Levels. Fine. She was going to have the small advantage of surprise.
What she could do with surprise was going to be quite lethal to them!