While I wasn't exactly clean, at least most of the moo-goo had been washed off. So it was still an improvement and I was going to count it as such. István was still happy at the discovery I'd granted him, which I'm sure was about to cost him several sleepless nights of finding new uses for that.

Viktor was shadow-boxing the air, probably in an attempt to figure how to do what I did. He came walking up to us, and was halfway through the word 'how' when István clamped a hand over his mouth, an impressive feat considering the size difference. Probably not the first time he'd had to do that.

Whipping out a small pad of paper and a writing implement from a pocket inside the light jacket he was wearing, István wrote out a few sentences in a micro version of his usual perfect script. He handed the notepad to me.

'Leave any questions for later; we do not know what sort of surveillance they have here.' And yes, he wrote the semicolon. It was very cute looking for some reason. The request itself was fair enough.

Of course, when he handed the pad over to Viktor he had to prevent him from attempting to read it out loud. I'd almost done the same thing myself, but caught it at the last moment.

I feel you, big guy.

Having ironed out those wrinkles, we finally were able to look around the room we'd come to. It was a relatively nondescript round room, mirroring the previous one we'd been in, which I found unnerving. Round rooms just didn't vibe with me. Probably because any room of that shape had to be created at exorbitant expense and I just didn't have a concept of having that kind of money available.

The sense of wrong increased as I looked closer at the doors. They had the same plaques on each side, and one of them, the one in the center had been broken out. A large crack in the ceiling extended down the wall and to the door frame, one that I assumed ran through to the other side. The cow I'd 'mistified' to death had clearly come through here.

Viktor grabbed the remains of the door frame and yanked it free of the wall, twisting it out of the rock and tossing it aside like a normal person might pull a weed. I got the feeling watching him do it that he was inhumanly strong even before he got his Mote. I couldn't even tell if he'd used any Nebula in the action he'd just done.

We all entered through the now unencumbered hole in the wall, and what we saw was pretty grotesque.

There were rows of cages lining the walls, all torn open. One larger one in the back had the crack from the ceiling come down the wall and intersect with the hinge side. Apparently the bovine monster had gotten out first and engaged in some kind of "vial of poison" contest where it proceeded to cheat the shit out of the whole thing and eat all the rest while they were still confined to their cages.

That probably explained why it had so much energy. I couldn't be sure whether it had both Cores to start, and due to the way I killed it I'd had no time to check. István appeared to be doing similar forensics as mine, only he was paying close attention to the signs on the walls and floor whereas I was just giving it my best scientific wild-ass guess.

We left that room and moved sideways to the next. What we found was similar, only in here there were more live animals, all still in the cages lining the walls. They had a variety of critters, mostly looking like a menagerie of what you could sweep off the street in the city or pluck out of the lifeless terrain of the scrub above us. As a result, a serious amount of screeching and other noises erupted when we entered, including one particularly belligerent squirrel which proceeded to bark at us - yes, like a dog - long after everything else quieted down.

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Surprisingly, the creatures in this room seemed largely untouched. Viktor proceeded to pull the doors off the cages unbidden and watched with a smile as all the various animals took off down the hallway. I wasn't sure if he was happy to help the wildlife or - being the big bear he was - glad that he'd have snacks for later.

We proceeded to the next room and found more of the same, with Viktor repeating his performance. At this point I think we were all getting little complacent and thus were caught off guard when a pair of tentacles reached through the last door and pulled Viktor right through it. While he seemed startled when he first disappeared through the threshold, he emerged a few seconds later, having hit the unfortunate malformation hard enough that it left cracks on the wall then was flattened into.

This new room was quite the horror show. There were tables spread out around, with different animals strapped down to them. Along one wall was a set of empty jars. Apparently interrupted mid-modification, there were some bloody medical tools set around on rolling stands. I wasn't really sure what had been in the jars, but I was pretty sure we'd be finding out sooner or later.

Turned out it was sooner - the next room held a wall of jars, all kept behind a pane of glass that felt almost cold to the touch. Inside each was a black mass that was generally spherical, but some of them held other shapes. All of them had little protrusions of matter that rose and fell away from the central mass rhythmically, as though the were breathing. Viktor went up and tapped on the glass. "What in the blazes is this thing?" he asked.

As one might have guessed, the Science Puppy was nipping at his heels, more than happy to give in to his curiosity to study them. He got right up in their business as well, almost pressing his face to the partition.

"Does not look like any technology we encountered working for the Veil," he said. "If I was to hazard a guess, I would say that these are used to to inflict the blight upon the monsters we've been encountering. Hard to say if it is one-to-one or if there is some sort of way to use these on more than one victim…" His voice trailed off, clearly lost in thought.

Viktor rapped on the glass again with his knuckles, making it flex a little, even with the light gesture. "Good thing we have them contained then," he said in jest, following it up with a laugh.

His humor seemed lost on István, or maybe the scientist was just lost in thought, but I cracked a smile at least.

I felt a small tug on my soul, similar to when I was looking at Artifacts before. I looked around just in time to see a shadow disappear though the doorway.

"We might have company," István said, and Viktor's laughing died, replaced with his punching face, which was the normal face he always had.

"I'm not so sure," I said, looking where the flicker of movement had been. "The vibe I got off of whatever that was, wasn't bad," I told the two of them. István seemed to relax at that and went back to his studies. Viktor went out the door, in search of things to apply violence to.

Turning back to István I gave the storage space with the jars another another look, then spotted something incongruous inside it. I wasn't even sure if I was directly seeing it, but I swore that I saw a pulse or change in the back that matched the rhythm of the masses in the containers twitching and swelling.

"Hold up one second," I said, switching into my aura vision again, which brought István's attention immediately. When I looked the second time, I realized there was some sort of tube supplying power into the back of the storage compartment.

"See anything?" István asked?

"There's some sort of 'power supply' feeding this room." I panned my vision downward's slowly. "Apparently it's below us somewhere. It's not using Nebula though, it's using whatever creepshow energy animates the things we've been fighting. Any ideas about that?"

"While we got our Embers from the Umbral Veil, I got the vibe that these were pretty generic as far as Embers go. We never got deep enough to see what really went on behind closed doors."

"So you never got to see behind the 'Veil'?" I said with a bit of a smirk, feeling happy about my intelligent wordplay. Contrary to my expectations, however, István just looked forlorn.

"Apparently not. It would have been good to know the truth."

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