Terror in the Deep: a Tale of PulchraGea

The Enemy's Gate is Down

Those sneaky grunts, strutting around in public wearing ball gowns and tuxedos! Slipping me a Scroll while dancing with me! Disappearing with a partner switch, then magically getting lost in the crowd! The gall of these bastards!
  Doug agreed as I met him by one of the snack tables.
  "It's slaved," he intuited, looking it over. "It won't even activate from this end. Incoming calls only, probably only from one device."
  I rubbed my hands together. Technology was me forte. I had a powerful desktop system in my luggage that was partially based off Atlantean Sirolhi processing technology. Highly experimental, definitely not yet available to the Security Council, let alone civilians. Doug and I excuse ourselves to our room and power it up.
  Modern Scrolls are almost completely hard light these days, more often than not just a hologram coming out of a wristband. Some people even get them surgically implanted under their skin. This one was old school, using second generation semisolid hologram projectors inside a quantanium/plastic frame. This is clearly a custom job, using basically homemade quantum entanglement.
  I set it in the center of my newer hard light screen, where it floats in the crystallized photons. The devices automatically connect, and the 'laptop' uses the smaller device to ping the entangled electron. Doug was right, the devices are definitely exclusive to each other. Neither are connected to the main PGN entanglement server farm. Interesting.
  Based on an untested theorem put forth by a relatively obscure PulchraGean physicist, I decided to record anything the Scroll on my end was picking up. According to the theorem you could hypothetically 'listen' in on even an exclusive pair. It would require some tinkering with my own scroll, but I would be able to effectively track the master device.
  Typically the entanglement would break as soon as the devices made any measurements, but Scrolls have long since got around this with another little known theorem, called Nurem's Quandary, wherein the quantum state both is and is not being observed; since the entangled electrons would naturally break their bonds upon observation, this allows us to read any changes between them without technically observing them, like Schrödinger's cat but not.
  With that technobabble out of the way, I'm basically reading the frequency of the slaved device they gave me and transferring it to my regular scroll, which is networked. It'll let me triangulate the master device's location based on my proximity to all the other networked Scrolls.

  Doug and I armed ourselves for combat and headed up the elevator. Champion was secured in it's sash around my waist, with the edge and hamon facing behind me in the classical style. Doug carries Frostbite on the left side of his belt, left hand on the basket hilt to keep the saber from hitting his leg as he walks. We take the elevator up to the main floor, with all the tourist amenities.
  As we exit the elevators, I get a one way message on the slave frequency, now on my phone. Good, now I can track it as long as it's active.
  A man in a vaguely familiar skull-like mask appears.
  "I see that you seek me out," he says in an electronically disguised voice. "So hasty for the blood of innocents to be on your hands.
  Doug and I turned toward where the signal was pointing and started gently elbowing through the crowds.
  "You think that because you are King you are responsible for our souls?" Sivarren scoffed. "A myth, a bedtime story to scare children into good behavior."
  Almost there. The crowds here are thicker, though. I could command them aside, but then they'd know we were coming. So we pushed through a little more forcefully.
  "What right have you to determine what's best for me and mine?" Sivarren said from the screen. I saw him now, in a shadowy corner of the Arcade. "Why should I trust a dictator monarch with the well-being of my family?"
  "Because I don't execute people in cold blood for attention," I whispered in his ear from behind. "Wouldn't you agree, bubba?"
  Doug nodded, leveled Frostbite at the chest of a Skull grunt who had started forward to challenge me.
  "I mean, you're not perfect, bro," Doug admitted, "but you don't murder people, so you got that going for you."
  Sivarren began to chuckle deeply in the synthetic bass his mask was supplying. "That's a good trick, King. I never thought you could trace quantum entanglement. They always said you were clever. I didn't realize you were this clever."
  When he turned toward me, I knew something was off. There was a milisecond's slur to his words, or perhaps a flickering in his face. Shit! The Arcade was a tactile hologram deck for playing things like laser tag, or simulated rock climbing. Sivarren wasn't even really here. It was a hard light hologram!
  "Unfortunately for you, it was my plan the whole time to lead you here."
  Sivarren faded away, along with the majority of the room, leaving only the Skull Lord's lackey, who was holding a fairly sizable crater grenade. Doug realized at the same second I did and raced for the entrance to the Arcade, where lay the emergency bulkhead release. I reached for the single 'quarantine mine' on my belt, threw it just as the Skull grunt detonated his charge against the wall. A circle of wall almost twenty feet across vaporized instantly, as well as a pocket of water. The resulting near vacuum caused the water to crash inward at an increased velocity.
  As the incoming water pummeled me, threatening to knock me out, I searched frantically for the target of the quarantine mine: a little girl, about four years old, brown hair, gold eyes. Her mother was in the energy field with her, thankfully.
  Doug grabbed my hand as he rushed past me out the hole along with almost everything else in the Arcade. Dozens of dead and dying people swirled in the tide caused by the implosion, with a King and a Ranger soon to join.