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Gale was still not convinced it wasn't about to blow up.

"Wonder if it recorded anything else," he muttered, and pressed the stop button, trying to see if there was anything before the current recording.

"Hey, it's a clue!" She held up the phone and waved it at Lawr and the rest of the watching (but not touching) hunters, and completely missing the simultaneous discovery of the camera. She brought the phone closer to her face to examine it, devoid of a danger sense. "Huh, a message? Looks like someone didn't get the bad news. Or maybe..."

Pandora paused dramatically to open the phone and check the message waiting for 'Susan'.

The valiant prince's breath had not-so-valiantly been knocked out of him as he was flung across the room by the other monarch, and it took several moments to recover. Of course, the stench did not really improve the situation, so he pulled his scarf over his nose and hoped for the best.

It seemed that many of them were investigating, so he peeked over the shoulder of the fair maiden that asked him to call upon her and slowly whispered:

"Beware the plague."

Lawr looked on with a mixture of interest and caution. He was just fine with curiosity, but too much curiosity could very rapidly make you very dead. He was just fine with the rest of the room poking and prodding all manner of things they shouldn't have been, and every time they came across something new, he edged back just a little further.

When the video camera fell down he frowned a little more deeply at its appearance. He hadn't seen anything with orange energy in it since he got here, it had all been blue, which led him to believe that the blue things were probably good, and this thing might possibly be bad.

The phone set him no less at ease.

"Just throwing this out there as a possibility y'all. Maybe these things were meant to be found, maybe they counted on everyone just hamhandedly pushing all the yes buttons, maybe you are arming something nasty?"

He put a desk between himself and the new equipment just in case and muttered under his breath. "But have fun with your mystery." Everyone these days was an armchair scientist. It was what had kept his pockets lined with money.

The cell phone began to blare music loudly. It was loud enough and of high tech enough for everyone in the room to hear. Video footage began to flash on its rather sleek surface.

"What does it mean to fight? If you knew you were fighting for the wrong cause would you still continue to do so. Is it better to continue to fight blind or to fight for the truth? There is only one truth."

The video footage showed an odd scene, one of a large room. The windows looked like that of Deus Ex, if not of the same building they were in themselves, but it was not a room most had seen. Bodies, clearly deceased were splayed from table to wall. The clip changed. More bodies, lying somewhere in a desert perhaps. The clip changed. A frozen outpost. Once again, the barren remains of survival in the form of the deceased. They were all wearing white.

"We are everywhere. We will watch and judge your actions and you shall receive punishment equal to them. We will continue to watch you. We will-

The footage begin to turn jumbled, as did the voice, the only thing consistent on the screen a giant white O before everything turned to white noise followed by a text message again.






The recording device did not have any memory card in it. However, just as Gale was about to give up, the screen lit up, just a small screen on the side.

It showed Gale handling the recording device, in live time, from a top angle.

Gale abruptly dropped the camcorder.

"Bloody hell - "

The voice from the phone rang out around him, loud and echoing, and Gale glanced over at it, squinting to see the screen. Then he wished he hadn't, because from what he could catch of it, it wasn't pleasant in the slightest.

He turned back to the camera, Jinhai appearing in a flash of light as Gale swung the rifle up towards the ceiling, squinting in suspicion.

"There's another camera somewhere," he said, and glanced at Taym, and then at Mark.

"Is there any method of getting the footage off of that camera?" he asked with a nod at the now discarded camera lying near Gale's feet.

Taym sacrificed his scarf to the cause of covering up the camera. Probably wasn't going to do any good given that everyone including himself had already gone and poked it, but the fact that it was probably still recording made him deeply uncomfortable, especially given the cheery message the phone had just dispatched. Better late than never. "Pretty sure it's made for broadcasting, not saving," he said. Quietly. "Maybe the others," he pointed at the phone, "are too." Live feed of corpses. Pleasant!

OK, let Mark and Gale handle that. When Gale's rifle showed up, Taym, with wordless obedience and pulling his coat collar over his face, went back up to make sure they'd gotten everything out of the wall, checking as close to the ceiling as he could reach.

The air of reassurance was short-lived. Even the mist trainee was transfixed by message, at first waiting for a clue, but eventually, like all the others, she watched because something was wrong. She let out a sharp gasp at the first image, and a few more increasingly hysterical noises at the others. Pandora began shaking silently under Edgar's hand as the the words faded into meaningless static and the circle branded itself into the screen. Her fingers slipped -

The phone hit the ground and clattered to a halt, flashing its ominious text message at anyone who looked.

It was too much. The dead body was one thing. It was intact, at least. But its stench permeated everything and left her queasy enough before being assaulted by images of carnage she had never seen before, let alone imagined. She had just enough time to tug the scarf-bandana down from her face before she leaned away and decorated the far corner of the room with the contents of a half-digested MRE.

"I'm sorry," she hiccuped. She repeated it several more times, like a quiet echo. There was nothing else she could say without feeling like she was going to be sick again. It was an embarrassment to lose her composure around so many people so much more experienced. She'd failed as a hunter, hadn't she? Her face felt hot, and her eyes itchy; it sounded like she was choking back a sob. Pandora shook her head, unable to compose herself. She stumbled back a few steps away from the crime scene. With no other options, she simply grabbed Edgar and pulled him down into a bear hug on the floor with her, burying her face in the fur of his cape where no one would have to see.

It felt like ages had passed, but it was a few minutes later that she finally slightly eased off of her death grip on Edgar. Just enough to pull her face away a little.

"So, are- are we going to die in seven days?" she croaked, glancing between the abandoned phone and the myriad death hunters still standing and staring.