“How long until someone notices that something’s wrong?” Bronte asked as she watched the prison’s security drones drag the last of the staff into a prison cell.

Erich's fingers continued to fly over the keyboard.

“Ideally, no one should know anything is off until the next shift starts,” he said. “Which should be a good seven hours from now.”

“And if things aren’t ideal?” One of Zig-Zag’s goons asked.

“We could get rumbled any second now,” he admitted. “It’s admittedly unlikely, but a hero might try to drop off prisoners here rather than at a police precinct.”

He would have liked to rule it out as impossible, but where heroes were involved anything was possible. The very idea of following protocol was anathema to some of them, and it was those sorts he could very easily see deciding that one government facility was as good as any other when it came to dropping off their belligerent foes.

In fact, he scanned the prison logs, and yep, just last week Star-Spangled chose to literally drop a few bank robbers in the prison courtyard before flying off. Never mind the fact that this particular facility didn’t even cater to criminals of a non-meta variety.

“Great, so we could have Blur or Mechanical dropping in on us any moment?” Another of the thugs muttered, unintentionally making Erich stiffen at the mention of his sister.

“I said it was unlikely,” he reiterated, thankful for his suit’s ability to deaden his voice.

“If it happens, it happens,” Bronte said before the goon could speak again. “If it does, we’ll deal with it.”

From the sound of the shuffling behind him, Erich could tell no one was happy about that. Still, none of them were dumb enough to piss off Bronte by continuing the discussion.

Happy she’d made her point, the lightning user turned her attention back to him. “So, how long is this going to take?”

Erich glanced at the countdown timer in the upper-right of his HUD.

Forty minutes.

“Now that I can actually see the system architecture I’m working with, I imagine it’ll take about an hour, uninterrupted,” he lied.

“That long? You’ve got the fucking control panel in front of you.”

Erich snorted. “This is the Ball and Chain we’re talking about here. Not some rinky-dink budget security system. Getting access to the system infrastructure is easy now that I’m here. Getting control though? That’s going to take time, even with my ‘prior experience.’”

“So what are we supposed to do? Sit around with our thumbs up our asses?” Zig-Zag asked.

“No,” Bronte answered before Erich could. “We’ll use the time to start fortifying this place. Ideally no one’s even going to know we we're here until we’re gone, but that’s no reason to not prepare.”

She gestured to the camera feed of the facility’s main vault, where rows upon rows of cryopods sat. “We can use the time to start thawing out prisoners.”

Alarm coloured Gravity's features. “I thought the plan was to thaw them out at the other end. Less trouble that way.”

Erich thought that was the plan as well. He should know, he’d been responsible for most of it.

Bronte gestured for her unnamed goon to stay in place before she started moving toward the door. “That was before I noticed those industrial de-thawing machines.”

“You do realize industrial is a relative term, right?” Erich shouted, stopping the woman before she reached the door. “The process is still painstakingly slow. An industrial de-thawer will be lucky if it de-thaws one individual an hour. Hell, it’ll be slower if their abilities interfere with the process.”

Which they almost inevitably would.

If Bronte was offended by his scepticism it didn’t show. In fact, her features took on a distinctly giddy tint as she looked at him. “Even one person is still an extra set of powers in the event we end up under siege.”

Gravity crossed her arms. “Attached to a volatile inmate who’s got no reason to help us beyond the slim possibility of escape. Which means they’ll be desperate, disorientated and angry. Not the kind of person I want watching my back if we end up with half the Guild outside.”

Bronte shrugged. “Nothing has changed from our original plan for the inmates beyond the timeframe. They’ll still be an inmate who has the equivalent of a limpet mine surgically welded to their skull. The plan always assumed that would be enough to ensure good behaviour. Long or short term.” Her eyes rolled around to Erich, “Assuming that you can activate the Ball and Chain prior to gaining access to the internal workings of the system?”

Erich nodded hesitantly. “The Ball and Chain system was designed to be next to impossible to turn off. By comparison, activating it is… relatively easy.”

The logic behind such a move being relatively simple, if not outright mentioned by the designers. Even if the Guild lost access to the central control panel for a prison site, they could still have one of their Artificers activate the devices remotely.

Though whether that Artificer would still be called a hero by the public after that is debatable.

“See? No problem.” Bronte grinned, some small shred of the woman she used to be shining through for a moment as things went her way. “Bruce here will keep Erich company.” She gestured to her silent goon. “Meanwhile, you and me need to go see who we want to thaw out.”

Bruce, eh? Erich thought as he glanced at the silent goon. What a load of horseshit…

Bronte strolled along the rows of frozen inmates. “Hydro-kinetic. Pyro-kinetic. Ferro-Kinetic. Another Hydro-kinetic… Do you think they just dumped all the ‘kinetics’ in one area?”

“Rapist. Arsonist. Serial-Rapist. Environmental Activist.” Gravity said as she looked up from her Omni-Pad.

“An activist?” Bronte glanced over at the last person on the line. A fairly mousy looking young woman. “What’s one of those doing in here?”

Gravity pulled up the young woman’s records.

“It seems she sank an oil tanker; killing everyone aboard and spilling fifty six million gallons of crude oil and assorted petroleum products into the Mexican Gulf in the process.”

“Powerful then,” Bronte said, “but not too bright. And an idealist. Probably not a great fit for our organization.”

Gravity scoffed as her half-sister continued to stride down the line. “You know you could just get Erich to filter out the sort of people you don’t want. It would probably take him all of a second.”

Bronte shook her head as she stopped in front of another figure. A large man so covered in scales that he looked more akin to a reptile than a person.

“Mechromancer’s busy enough making sure we can actually extract the people we’re hoping to acquire,” she said absently, before a smile pulled her features. “Besides, window shopping can be fun in its own right.”

Gravity resisted the urge to point out that they were talking about violent criminals, and not a new pair of shoes. She was sure her sister was well aware and was just trying to bait her.

“What about you, our silent friend?” Bronte asked, turning toward the final member of their trio. “Any opinions on who your boss might pick?”

The silence from Zig-Zag’s goon spoke for him.

“I’m curious as to who they will end up picking,” Bronte continued. “It would be unfortunate if we were to have some sort of overlap.”

“I sincerely doubt that Zig-Zag has told her hired help who she plans to recruit,” Gravity said.

Bronte shrugged. “No, I don’t imagine she has. All smoke and mirrors that one. But that doesn’t mean our friend over there doesn’t know. After all, they could be Zig-Zag.”

“It’s a one in three chance,” Gravity said. “Is there a point to this?”

They didn’t know whether the shapeshifter was in here with them, or back in the control room with Erich, his drones and Bronte’s other lackey.

“I don’t know? It just seems a bit pointless is all,” Bronte said. “All this subterfuge and swapping out with her people. Sure, it would make getting the drop on our erstwhile ally a bit more difficult, but only a bit.”

Gravity's brow furrowed. The silent goon adjusted his grip on their weapon. She didn’t like where this was going.

“After all, figuring out which one is the shapeshifter is as simple as checking their weight.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the ensuing silence, before Bronte chose to speak again.

“I’ll admit, it took me a little longer than Erich to figure out, but I did in the end. I mean, our shapeshifting friend has got to be unreasonably dense,” Bronte continued. “All that extra biomass they call on when they go tentacled abomination has to come from somewhere after all?”

“You can spout bullshit all you want bitch,” the thus far silent goon said, “but neither me or my friends are about to step onto a set of scales, so you can take your amateur hour hypothesis and shove it up your ass.”

Bronte grinned, even as the man across from her clicked off the safety on his weapon, prompting Gravity to do the same.

“I don’t know about that. All sorts of security sensors in a prison. Radiation. Metal. X-ray. Weight…” Bronte singsonged.

Gravity realized they'd passed through a security checkpoint on the way over here. Now her half-sister’s ‘sudden’ decision to defrost an inmate made sense.

“You never actually planned to unfrost anyone.”

Bronte’s gauntlets flared to life, crackling with electricity. “And add another variable to this plan? No, I’m all about removing unwanted variables at this stage of the game.”

That was the moment the ‘nameless goon’ erupted into a spiked mass of tentacles and shrieking mouths.