<<<25 September 2057, 09:23—spoiler for "Legacy" from Corporate Punishment >>>

Well, it certainly feels like a lot of time has passed--it surprised me to realise that we'd only taken a month or so off before returning to Seattle.

'Wraith called shortly after I arrived back; he wanted to look into procuring more employment and see about replacing our truck. He invited me by, so I took that opportunity to introduce him to Roger. It was amusing watching him try to figure out Roger's mini-dragon form--despite his best efforts, nothing like that showed up in any of his databases. He did seem to like my new friend's taste for beer, though.

Joe and Ocelot arrived and we attended to matters vehicular-- or rather, they did while I started to read one of the books 'Wraith had given me after meeting Roger. Not a bad author, this Anne McCaffrey. The others made arrangements for us to obtain another truck (in much the same way as before--seems we have an aversion to paying for trucks) and then called Harry to see if he had anything gainful available.

Fortunately for us, he did--the only catch was that we had to decide quickly, because the meet was that same night. Harry assured us that he trusted the Johnson in question, so we agreed to the meet and set off for the Barrens shortly thereafter to meet Mr. Johnson.

Mr. Johnson turned out to be Ms. Johnson, and she had an interesting offer indeed: we'd be flying to an unknown location in the UCAS, where we would have 12 days to obtain custody of an item "of a magical nature" that was currently being held in a place of somewhat less security than it normally was. We bargained a bit and finally agreed to 80,000 up front with another 120K upon completion.

The unknown location turned out to be Boston, and the item of a magical nature turned out to be something called "The Scrolls of the Elements." We found this out after taking a first-class flight back East and settling into our hotel suite (our employers certainly know how to provide accommodations, if nothing else.) The scrolls are currently at MIT&T, where they are being studied. Interesting...

What's even more interesting is the scrolls' real origin. The name had been sounding vaguely familiar, and that evening after our employer's agent arrived to fill us in on the details of the run, I remembered: the scrolls were also known as the Scrolls of --and they were a bequest from Dunkelzahn to Hualpa. Hualpa is a feathered serpent.

Uh oh. And we even made it a point to ask if the owner of the magical item was human or metahuman, and Johnson said yes.

'Wraith did some checking on the Matrix (since our cover IDs are students and professors at MIT&T we could get away with it) and I contacted my old friend Mark (who was very surprised to hear I was in town, since we haven't seen each other in years), and between all of us we managed to discover that the scrolls had been lent to MIT&T to allow a small, hand-picked group of scholars to study them, since Hualpa apparently hasn't been able to make any sense of them. The Dunkelzahn Institute, also located in Boston, is taking care of the lending.

A feathered serpent can't make sense of them. Have I said 'Uh oh' before? If not, I'll say it now.

So now we've got a number of questions: why are the scrolls at MIT&T instead of at the Institute, where they'll have much higher security? Did Johnson lie to us or was she lied to? Who are we really working for? And more importantly...who are we working against? I don't know about the rest of the team, but I am not in any hurry to steal anything from the Dunkelzahn Institute or another dragon.