Accessory Wars

Chapter 30-Felisa

            To help with our search, we enlisted the help of Officer Colfry. Reagan and Mysti wanted to help too but I didn't want them to see what happened inside the arena. Officer Colfry turned down their request before I mustered up the courage to do so myself, much to my relief. All the footage Kami gathered would be sent to the ERT once we finished and we would need to destroy our copy. That meant if we were going to find any secrets in the footage, we needed to do it in the next nineteen hours before the ERT came to arrest Jay.

Officer Colfry set up a conference room for us. It contained a projector screen, allowing us to both download the files onto a memory drive and allow Officer Colfry to watch. We started with watching the entire scene from start to finish. I was blown away with how short the run time was. Total recording time was twelve minutes with the first few being me looking around the crowds. Kami had set her headgear to automatically record after equipping several months ago to prepare us for Waterliep. We lucked out she never turned the setting off.

After the initial run through, we began taking it one scene at a time. Kami worked the video forward and backward frames at a time while Officer Colfry and I took notes. It took until evening before we managed to compile everything and what we discovered...it was both shocking and baffling.

We called in Nadia from the ERT and she brought in her husband, a man named Reed, as well as several other ERT officers. It felt like we were putting on a presentation for school only if the teacher failed us, then we would fail Jay.

"I doubt anything you'll show me will change his fate," Nadia remarked as she seated herself. "Cameras went down with the attack so any information you present can be deemed as tampered."

"I can vouch for them that, from what I've seen, the footage is accurate," Colfry replied. He pulled up the video and nodded to me. Kami forwarded the video to the part where we saw the tattoo for the first time. "Felisa noticed this mark during her initial clash. She said she didn't think much of it at the time and at a cursory glance, she'd be right. However, after reviewing the footage, we found similar marks on other Elicits."

Kami pulled a series of video clips, a gif file I think she called them, onto the screen. It showed three other rogues fighting. Each image zoomed in to show the same mark on their arm, neck and a peek from underneath their shoulder. The tattoos were a shade of sepia that closely matched their skin tone, making them hard to see at a glance.

"We found no marks on any of the Elicits we arrested," Nadia argued. "A few tattoos but none of this shape."

"But I did see it," I pleaded. She shot me a look and my argument died in my throat. They had to mean something. But what?

Kami skipped to the part where we watched Jay sail overhead and let the video play out. I re-watched the scene showing Jay pulling Ki out of the way of the shuriken. I glanced at Nadia, seeing a sour frown on her face. Her husband stood stone faced behind her. We reached the point I grabbed my bag of flour from the negative realm and Kami slowed down the footage. My reticle jumped over the screen in half speed. When the light erupted around Jay, she paused it.

"Did you miss it?" Kami had me say.

"Miss what?" Nadia questioned. Kami reversed the footage and played it again. "I didn't see anything."

"Pay attention to her reticle," Officer Colfry said. "Kami, play it back frame by frame for us." Kami did so. She paused for a second after each time the reticle moved. For two frames, it jumped to something partially obscured by the flour. "Nadia, how many casualties did we have?"