Shadow Knight: The Mastermind's Gauntlet

Chapter 3: Mind Games

Elevator Maintenance Room, Basement: March 10th, 2017: 7:50 PM

Detective Pierre Alverez examined the floor of the elevator maintenance floor as instructed by Chief Reed when he and his partner Detective Noah Sinclair arrived.

He saw a set of tire treads that came into the room, but never left.

They stopped somewhere near where an elevator would have been parked when it was undergoing maintenance.

But it wasn't one of the Seven Elevators, which elevator was this?

But what really caught both his and his partner's attention was that from the shoe prints and skid marks on the dusty floor which was also lined with evidence of the modifications of the Seven Elevators having been done here on this floor...the story they told them was disconcerting.

"You see what I see Detectives?" Chief Delilah Reed asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes. It doesn't make sense..." Detective Pierre Alverez said confused, "I don't know what to make of the tire tread marks. But according to the evidence here, the security guard was knocked out outside this room by the perpetrator and then dragged back inside... and then she left the room and kept going down the hall towards the stairs leading upstairs."

"...so what's your conclusion Detective?" Chief Delilah Reed asked.

"She left the building." Detective Pierre Alverez concluded.

"That's what I thought also" Chief Reed agreed.

"....she left the building? How...wouldn't that desk clerk have had seen the building system say that it had to check her out or...?" Detective Noah Sinclair paused in mid-sentence as realization struck him and everyone else present in the room like a...well...a falling elevator.

"I think it's time we had a talk with that front desk clerk again..." Chief Delilah Reed said with determination.

Suddenly the door to the elevator maintenance room shut on its own and locked as well.

The fellow officers in the room with them went for the door, only to find the door was locked tight and the door latch was useless.

While everyone tried to figure out a way to get out of the Maintenance room, Detective Pierre Alverez suddenly noticed that the walls of the room began to flicker...almost as if...they were made out of TV screens.

Detective Pierre Alverez didn't know what was going to happen next, but years as a Lunar City Detective had taught him to be cautious.

So he shielded his eyes by pulling his overcoat over his eyes.

He could see a series of flashes go off outside his coat through the threads and reflect off the ground at the bottom of his coat...but not as strongly as he would have if he hadn't shielded his eyes.

When the flashes stopped, he removed his makeshift blind and looked around to see a strange sight.

His partner, the chief, the three cops...something had happened to them.

They were standing in place, and looking blankly and frozen in the direction of the walls of the room from where they had been standing a second before the strange flashing.

Detective Pierre Alverez waved his hand in front of the chief, and then poked on of his fellow officers in the arm with his pointer finger.

He watched dumbfounded as he fell to the floor, but the expression on his face didn't change.

"Oh my god, I think that light killed them" Detective Pierre Alverez said in silent horror.

"Not kill, paralyze. Photo-hypnosis trance inducement is one of my specialties...these TV screens and what they display are my own invention" The voice of The Mastermind came in through speakers hidden in the TV screen walls of the modified maintenance room.