|Ace>

  We found the spot where the man had been standing guard, but there was nothing left of him except some blue dust blowing away in the breeze. The door was left ajar, too. I pushed it open a little more, and Cherry and I peeked through. Inside was a corridor - a plain, stone corridor with another door at the end.

  "Livitha works fast." Cherry whispered.

  That corridor wasn't enough evidence for an article, so we crept down the hall toward the second door. This one opened into the side of another corridor, and not an empty one at that. The hallway was lined with rolly carts filled with lab equipment. Glass beakers, tubes connected to mysterious apparatuses, and instruments I couldn't identify cluttered the metal surfaces. Boxes and crates were stacked against the walls - storage, from the look of it.

  We tiptoed inside, moving between the carts and listening for any sounds of people. The only sound was a faint, rhythmic hum coming from somewhere deeper in the facility - like machinery running on a cycle.

  Cherry moved ahead of me, her curiosity outpacing her caution as usual. She suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes went wide as saucers, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. She looked back at me, pointing frantically toward something I couldn't yet see.

  I stepped forward to follow her gaze. Through a doorway on our right was a room lined with large glass capsules, each about the size of a coffin stood on end. Inside them swirled a dark, viscous substance - not quite liquid, not quite gas. It occasionally shifted and roiled as if something inside was writhing, struggling to take form. It was the same stuff the shadow monsters were made of during that fight in the Gardens. As we watched, or maybe as my eyes adjusted to the low light, faint yellow pinpricks appeared on the sludge's surface, seemingly looking right at us.

  Stranger still, there were people in the room with the capsules. Two figures in lab coats moved between the containers, fiddling with something inside one of the capsules. I pulled up my menu and took some pictures, careful not to make any sound. Then I slowly moved toward the doorway, trying to get a clear shot of the people's nameplates - I couldn't tell if they were players or NPCs.

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  Just as I leaned forward, the distinct click of a door latch echoed down the hallway behind us. Someone was coming.

  Cherry grabbed my arm. We scrambled deeper into the facility, silently hurrying down the hall and piling through the first door we found. I pulled it shut behind us.

  When we turned around to see where we'd put ourselves, however, we were not alone.

  The room was wide and deep, the far end lost in shadow. But the near section was filled with animal pens - dogs, cats, things that must have been taken from the streets. A little farther in, I could make out larger enclosures holding barnyard animals - chickens, goats, even a cow.

  All of them had at least one patch of that same dark goop we'd seen in the capsules grafted onto their bodies like a parasitic growth. Some of the animals were curled up in the corners of their pens, shaking in agony. But most had gone slack and listless, moving with the sluggish, uncoordinated motions of the deeply ill or dying. Their eyes glowed with that same faint yellow light.

  In the farthest parts of the room, where the shadows grew deeper, I could see dozens of those yellow eyes glaring back at us, unblinking and inhuman.

  Cherry and I stood frozen for a moment. Then I nudged her arm and whispered, "You get that side."

  We moved down the aisle in opposite directions, holding our UIs up and taking pictures of the corrupted animals. The farther we went, the worse it got. The deeper parts of the room housed larger creatures - what would normally be mobs in the rest of the game world. Dire wolves strained against their chains, snarling with a ferocity amplified by the patches of shadow substance. Dinosaur-like lizards leaped at the bars of their pens, trying to claw at us with talons that dripped with something black and viscous.

  And at the very back, barely visible in the dim light, were prison cells holding human NPCs. Their conditions varied wildly - some catatonic, others feral and throwing themselves against the bars, and some simply huddled in the corners, looking back at us with pleading eyes.

  Neither Cherry nor I had anything to say. We simply took our pictures, documenting each horror, as if focusing on the task could somehow distance us from what we were seeing.

  Then we stepped back.

  And then we ran.

  At the door, we stopped and faced each other again.

  "What is this place?!" I hissed.

  Cherry shook her head. "I don't know, but it sure ain't a bunch of dudes playing cards!"

  "Who do you think's running the place?"

  "It's gotta be the King, right?" Cherry said. "This is an entente quest."

  "But what if it's the Guard? You remember that story about the Fringe using NPCs as slave labor? The game made a quest to show the abuse to the players!"

  "You believe that?" Cherry asked.

  "I do now, yes! They already had us circumvent the Guard's gate checkpoint! What if it's upping the ante?!"

  Cherry looked shocked for a moment. "On second thought, we have to find evidence on who's calling the shots!"

  "Yeah!"