10 years, 66 days before The Incident – 1339H

  District [REDACTED] Nest

  Magister Office Headquarters

  Even in the Nest Lian hailed from, which was relatively insular and did not often concern itself with ‘outsider’ matters much - on top of a certain condescension towards other Districts - a certain effervescence could be felt in the streets. The reason for that was simple: For once, the events that had taken place elsewhere were directly and noticeably affecting them in the comfort of their ivory towers, and this was not something that happened often. As a result, even those who liked to think of themselves ‘above mere gossiping’ were indulging in it discretely.

  The Smoke Wars were over. That was the big news on every block. Even the Backstreet rats who hadn’t even known there was a war in the first place due to being too caught up in their little small-time things and the ordeals of day-to-day survival noticed. They noticed because the smog that had been choking the City for as long as many people remembered was starting to dissipate. The old L-Corp had been shattered, its assets torn down, and its foes stood victorious.

  The biggest winner in this was probably once again the vultures. No doubt, there were already very high-rated mercenaries fighting over salvaging even just small clues of the fallen Wing’s Singularity, and any other valuable secrets they could no longer defend. Meanwhile, Syndicates of all stripes would soon start to fight among one another – if it hadn’t started already – in turf wars to decide who would take over L-Corp’s former territory, most likely to end up partitioning it between one another once enough blood had soaked the streets.

  That in turn of course meant the biggest losers were the inhabitants of the former L-Corp’s Nest. Nests, under the direct protection of a Wing, were seen as safe havens where most of the Backstreets’ violence and brutality could not enter. It was why it was the goal of most denizens of the Backstreets to somehow buy, scheme or kill their way into living in a Nest. With the Wing gone however, that protection was also suddenly gone, and the frightened inhabitants would be fell upon, like fat and slow sheeps to several whole competing packs of starving wolves.

  It was far from the first time this happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. This time though, something seemed to be different. Yue narrowed her eyes as she started to read the report she’d picked up a second time, back from the top, in disbelief of its contents. It seemed as if, perhaps, those scums’ time to prey would be cut short, because someone had beaten them all to the punch.

  As it happened, it seemed that a new L-Corp had already been founded and approved by the Head to replace the old one. What that meant for the Nest, though, was unclear. It was only natural for new Wings to rise up and replace the old, but the latter’s remaining Feathers were often cast out without mercy by the new authority, thrown to the wolves all the same. Corps only operated on self-interest after all, they never did anything out of mercy or empathy, and if they ever claimed to... that was a clear sign to be very wary.

  What was distinctly not usual though, was the speed with which this ‘new L-Corp’ had formed. Normally, it took quite a while, leaving the grounds in anarchy as previously described, and often, whatever powerful Syndicate had come out on top needed to be forcefully driven out before a new Wing could emerge. This was often a way for them to gain notoriety by showing the effectiveness of their new Singularity which had not been seen before; a secret weapon not yet understood by any of those it was being used against.

  The fact that this new Wing had risen so quickly meant only one thing, it had help from somewhere else. Most likely rather powerful or influential players within the existing system. This was, of course, not surprising as so many people wanted the old L-Corp gone, not only because of the nuisance of the smog, but because they were starting to get too comfortable in their monopoly on energy and to charge marked up prices, which made other, equally powerful Wings very upset. Frankly speaking, it could have been absolutely anyone.

  Within Magister Office, there were even some quietly whispering that the Head itself – the unquestionable and uncontested power that ruled over the City – was involved somehow. There was credible arguments to back such a claim of course. As mentioned before, the fall of the City’s primary energy provider could have had massive consequence and caused City-wide chaos as the players that remain fought over dwindling energy sources. It was unambiguously in the Head’s interest to avoid this and facilitate an expedient transition.Yet, Lian felt as if this otherwise compelling hypothesis was wrong. It wasn’t as if she had personal experience with the Head, despite aspiring to it, and she was mostly running off of mere intuition. Yet, she felt as if that was just not the case. In her perception, the Head very rarely directly got involved in such matters. It only watched, and let issues resolve themselves without intervention unless it absolutely needed to, usually due to a Taboo being broken.

  There were, effectively, very few true laws in the City set by the Head itself, one just needed to pay their taxes and avoid dabbling in prohibited forms of research or experiments – the Taboos. As long as people did that, they were generally quite safe from the Head’s attention, which instead allowed the Wings to manage the day-to-day laws and quirks of the Districts under their care. One was exponentially more likely to run afoul of a Wing’s laws and ‘lesser Taboos’ than to have to deal with the Head, which loomed as this near-mythical presence, which all citizen feared, but most had never seen once in their lives.

  Which they should well be thankful for. The violent Syndicates who fought over control of the backstreets and routinely came into conflict with Fixers were certainly bad, and the massive corporate wars that unleashed terrible mass-weapons of poorly understood arcane technologies were even more dreadful. Yet, not even the Colors – the most powerful of the City’s Fixers by far – nor the Singularities of the Wings could save them from the wrath of the Head, should they break a Taboo and earn the visit of a Claw – their enforcers – or even worse, an Arbiter...

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  In any case, the new L-Corp’s swift rise was nothing short of prodigious, and her intuition told her that they might well have been colluding with the very people who started the war, if not done so themselves. Both theories would be equally sensible. Either other Wings who wanted the old L-Corp gone had looked for some other sods to take their place after they were removed to avoid mass chaos, or these new people had played off the hostilities between the Corps and manipulated them into fighting one another to create an opportunity. One or the other, though, Lian had no real evidence yet, so this was nothing more than pure conjecture, though it was also conjecture that felt strangely compelling. The mystery around those events was nagging at her in a personal way that she couldn’t quite explain or understand, though it wasn’t as if she had a personal connection in the events or a stake in it. Just like any other citizen, she was simply glad that the smog was disappearing after all those years.

  No, that wasn’t true. She was just lying to herself by acting so detached. In reality, Lian was growing obsessed by this, because only those who dared to take great risks and make big gambles – like they had – ever managed to achieve anything big in the City. Hard work and talent alone could get one to places, but never quite to the top. The part of her young mind that burned with ambition, too, saw an opportunity in the chaos. An opportunity to acquire powerful knowledge, or perhaps connection.

  The driven young Fixer nearly spat out her tea when she moved on to the next file on her pile, and saw the photo on the first page. It was a press release regarding the new L-Corp, featuring one of their executives-slash-scientists. Nothing out of the ordinary or particularly interesting on first glance... until she realized that the man on the photo, although unremarkable and plain, felt familiar for reasons she alsi couldn’t explain. It was as if she’d seen him somewhere else before, even though she was quite certain she’d never met the man.

  Setting her teacup back down on the polished black granite, Lian abruptly stood up and went to search through the cabinets in her office, looking for the source of that strange Deja Vu she just had. It wouldn’t be easy, as this was very much so the proverbial needle in the haystack, but she went at it with great energy, animated by that nagging sensation when something seemed to be just at the tip of one’s tongue, yet vexingly just out of reach.

  It took a while, but eventually, she found it. A withered brochure she’d picked up on a whim on a common job because something at the time made it look important. That man was definitely on it too, though he seemed... a lot happier than in the recent one. Comparing the two photos, Lian quickly could get an idea as to why: None of the people who were also present in the older photo were still around him in the newer one. Given the ways of the City, chances are, those people – his friends – were no longer.

  With a definitive connection established, the young Fixer gave the old brochure a renewed look-over. The ‘Soul Healing Institute’... she’d dismissed the whole thing as snake oil when she first found it but... if someone who used to be affiliated with it was now a high member of a Wing, then there might have been something more to it. Something real. Wings weren’t just made by anyone with enough money or cunning. They needed a Singularity – an exclusive technology capable of wondrous or frightful things. Had they developed something like that already back then?

  Opening a new case altogether, Lian started to look for anything she could find that would be relevant to either the new L-Corp, or the obscure Institute she’d never heard of outside of that piece of paper, yet was clearly starting to prove to be meaningful. Once again, the search would be arduous, but not just because the information was old and obscure. No, more likely than not, she was getting into territory that had been purposefully concealed.

  As it was starting to appear – from her point of view at least – this ‘Institute’ sounded as if it had started with good, if perhaps naive intentions, and might have discovered something along the way. Whether that discovery was on purpose or by accident, there was no way to tell yet, but there was a good chance it had to do with why that man had managed to acquire a Singularity worth of a Wing, and why his companions were no longer around to witness it, one way or another.It took all night and much of the next day, as well as no small amount of rusing to get information from older members of Magister Office with higher clearance and influence, but Yue eventually managed to pick up on two interesting pieces of information that warranted further studying.

  The first was a strange case of an attempted kidnapping that seemingly involved a Color – again one of the most powerful Fixers in the entire City – nabbing some seemingly unrelated youth that was one of the many scions of an extremely influential family of their District. This.. was not something that happened at all. Colors were the most respected Fixers of all and were employed to take care of extremely dangerous missions, they didn’t engage in this sort of.. low-level banditry befitting of common Syndicates.

  More curious yet, was the fact that the boy had been released, apparently due to some dumb mistake on his identity, without harm or ransom or anything... and had subsequently decided to leave his promising prospective career to work with his would-be kidnapper... and one specific woman.. who happened to be featured front and center in the old brochure. More prominently even than the man who had now ended up at the head of a nascent Wing. That sort of connection was strong, and only raised far more questions than it answered.

  Ultimately, there was only one choice left for Lian. She needed to follow the one, single lead that she’d gotten from that second piece of information. The more she dug into this whole thing, the more bizarre it became, and the more compelling its mysteries from the angle of simply getting some answers to it all. The more she learned, and the more she wanted to know. This would ultimately lead her to a rather dangerous place indeed, where most people wished never to be.

  The Outskirts.