Outside the Mirage

#10: Deep Dive

When Vanessa woke up the next morning, she felt both very tired and very in pain. Getting out of bed, she wrestled herself into another pair of ever-shrinking pants and one of the few clean dress shirts she had before throwing on one of her Persian silk jackets. Deciding to put her hair into a ponytail instead of wasting time getting it pretty. Heading out the door, she took her usual hour-and-a-half commute across town to get to work.

Walking into the Gerald R. Ford Building, Vanessa wormed her way to the elevator, a headache threatening to show its ugly face in the back of her brain. Finally getting onto the electronic device, she said, "Department of Containment, floor seventeen."

"Department of Containment," the elevator chimed. "Agent Trainee Moreland, verified."

The elevator shot its way up as Vanessa rubbed her forehead. She tried to remember what had happened the night before. She had gone out with Theo, she knew, but after her wings, she was having trouble remembering.

She felt her phone buzz. Grabbing it from her pocket, she saw it was a text from Theo.

"Thanks for hanging out last night. I had a good time."

Vanessa sighed. That was nice, but vague. "What happened last night?" she texted back.

The elevator stopped.  Getting off, Vanessa walked to her office, dumping herself into her chair and loudly groaning.

Her phone buzzed again. "We had drinks and then I dropped you off at home. Why"

"Sorry. I must've been tired, didn't remember anything after the dinner."

Putting her phone on her desk, Vanessa opened her computer and began to look through her emails. Most of her emails were simply people attempting to schedule appointments with Merlyn. Currently, for instance, Special Agent Forsythe of the Department of Concealment and a man named Callum McCormick were attempting to schedule appointments sometime that week. Vanessa sighed and opened Merlyn's calendar; he was pretty free, in all reality, with an hour blocked off for lunch every day and very few other actual events placed on the calendar. Looking from date to date, Vanessa put in one appointment for Wednesday and one for Friday, both at 1.30pm. Nodding to herself with satisfaction, she closed her email and began to look up Quinn Edwards on the internet.

It was difficult to find a lot of information at first, or at least, it was difficult to find what she was looking for. There was a minor article from the Gunner's Marathon Paper from a couple weeks ago, letting the city know that Quinn Edwards had mysteriously gone missing during the Nelson Award Ceremony. Before that, she was mentioned in an article about a legal case involving the Dosev family nearly a year prior, citing Quinn as being the fresh face on the legal team.

"She worked for Dosev," Vanessa grumbled. "Real piece of work, that girl."

Beyond that, though, there was not a lot. The only other real piece of evidence that Vanessa could find was an article from a high school newspaper from Indiana, where Quinn was noted as being the valedictorian of the school and she planned on going to the University of Chicago.

Rolling her eyes as she begun to peer through the records of the University of Chicago, but was unable to come up with anything that actually connected Quinn to the school. About to give up, she happened upon a picture of the school's volleyball team, where she saw the petite young woman pictured with the rest of the players. Looking at the caption, Vanessa saw that she was listed as "Quinn Morrison".

"Quinn Morrison," Vanessa mumbled, typing the name into her search engine. Sure enough, a number of articles popped up, calling Quinn Morrison one of the best law students and volleyball players the University of Chicago had ever seen. Clicking on a video of a volleyball game, Vanessa watched as a pink-haired Quinn pulled off an amazing stunt; she jumped forward to hit a volleyball headed her way, but the ball was just slightly too far off and Quinn seemed to have missed it completely. However, despite the actual evidence of Quinn missing the ball, she closed her eyes and the ball jerked upwards and across the net anyway.