The unveiling begins... When: Just before he starts receiving texts from Shimmer Where: Property closer to Nelson than Searchlight
It had been longer than he’d hoped before he was finally able to have the box collected and relocated to the ‘new’ facility he’d secured, and Radek was relieved when it had finally left his home’s grounds. The sigils and other marks he’d seen had been what had stirred him on to find another location for the ‘delivery’. It had been many centuries since he’d seen them, and on that occasion they had been the tools of a mage whose intentions had definitely not been of a pleasant nature.
As the last man from the refurbishing crew left Radek wondered for a moment whether it was such a sensible thing to do, be in a remote location off Highway 95, closer to Nelson than Searchlight, and no-one really knowing he was there. Other than Brianna. Though she didn’t know the actual address.
“Fool, you forget how hard it is to have to die a thousand deaths in a week because no-one was there to lend a hand!” he admonished himself gruffly, ruefully reminding himself of just how comfortable and predictable his life had become in this millennium.
He muttered as he paced around the box, now sitting on a stainless steel workbench in the middle of a newly-outfitted room. If anyone familiar with the abandoned property and its dilapidated abattoir facility happened by, they might notice the extensive number of tyre tracks leading around the rundown old homestead to the ramshackle outbuildings behind it. Or they may not. Inside one of those buildings was what had been, in its heyday a century earlier, a modern facility for slaughtering and dressing cattle carcasses. But times had changed, the county had seen a huge fall off of population, the towns started shrinking and the big city places left the small independents with no alternative but to shut down and sell up, or in this case, walk away and leave it to the bank. It had sat on their books for longer than anyone could remember, and when new management started to look at ways to recoup some recent losses, getting rid of old assets that were never a chance of turning a profit, it gave Radek a chance to pick the property up for a negligible sum.
Being a doctor gave him a perfect reason for having the facility upgraded without too many eyebrows being raised. He vaguely explained he was carrying out some research on the medicinal benefits of various plants and needed somewhere away from any potential fall out if something in his experiments went sideways. It wasn’t too far from the truth, in his mind, and the workmen he’d managed to find through some of his contacts were not the types to ask too many questions anyway. They viewed the work simply as income, and ignored the ‘crazy doc’ when he started mumbling away in some foreign language as he paced around the property.
It was a large place, over 100 acres of land. It included a mine, something which had sounded rather handy to Radek, though not for the potential recovery of silver or gold, more for the disposal of anything that required a little more privacy.
“So, let’s see what we actually have here,” he said to himself. As he was about to finally remove the sides of the crate his phone buzzed in his pocket...
Radek stared at the last message, sighed softly to himself and looked across at the box. The room was hermetically sealed with negative pressure double-access entrance doors, all steps taken to 'prevent anything from escaping - pollens, and the like'.
"Another day," he muttered, and a short while later was on the 95, heading back home.