Samson did not enjoy looking plain, but for jobs like these, it was a useful skill to have. He had pulled some recon during the day, wearing jeans, flannel and a baseball cap. That outfit, complete with a pony tail, had made him look like a NASCAR enthusiast. Still, he could not hang around the place where the lab used to be for too long in broad daylight: its location had been too remote for incidental passersby and the area was still under investigation.
The night would have to protect him. As a witch, he had faith in that.
Samson parked his car a fifteen minute walk away from where the labratory had been. It was cold and clear night, so the moonlight helped him out as he picked his way through the hillside. Climbing the fence proved to be not that tricky: he landed softly on the leaf-covered ground. He pocketed the thick gloves he had used to navigate the barbed wire on top of the fence, though he had not been able to avoid the bottom of his left jean leg snagging and ripping. The rest of the security would be lax: after all, there was nothing left to protect.
He was in. Now came the hard part.
He found a clearing amidst the rubble. He assumed he was in what used to be one of the outer rooms in the southern wing. He took a bottle of water out of his satchel and took two aspirins. Precaution. After tonight, he would definitely be having a headache.
He located a piece of shrapnel among the rubble that looked like it had not been a piece of the building proper. Then, he took out the five reasons his satchel was heavier than it looked: they were large quartz crystals, each wrapped in a thick red cloth. After he had placed them, he used a mixture of herbs and fairy dust to draw a circle and then sat down at the center of it.
He shut his eyes. Focus. Ignore the cold, ignore the wind, ignore the sounds...
It took over fifteen minutes until he was in the zone. When he opened them again, he saw the world differently. It was starker, almost devoid of all color. He felt the tendrils of his mind reach out, strengthened by the focus of the circle he had drawn. He focused on the piece of shrapnel - what had it been? what had it been? yes, yes yes yes, a part of a computer - and within seconds, he Saw things. Heard things. Felt things.
A female yanked down her mask and went about grabbing the third man, stacking all three against the wall where the vials were stacked. A Mermaid’s tail, a Unicorn’s horn, bits of Gargoyle in stone form,a pair of Pixie’s wings, an entire Dragon’s wing. All in various states of whole and there was even more, the kind of reagents that you craft spells with that had an almost unholy strength. The veins around their eyes and necks were becoming more prominent, a miasmic green as they pulsed, skin pulling and tearing like a leper set on fast forward.
The image made him snap out of it. Jesus fucking Christ. What the hell? It seemed he had hit pay dirt - it made sense that this had called out to him, considering the violence of the scene - but he could not make any sense of it yet. An attack on the laboratory workers. Skin shifting and coiling, as if it was pulled tight around their bones. He felt vaguely nauseous and his skin itched, as if there was something acidic crawling through his veins.
It took him a moment and a lot of deep, calming breaths to lose those feelings of disorientation. The problem with seeing reality other than what it was, was that it was hard to shake off. He was not a true soothsayer - thank God. Seeing the future mostly meant that you went loopy after a while - but seeing the past could be just as damaging for your sense of self.
When he had stopped feeling as if his skin was decaying away, he got to his feet and started to look for another focus item. He would be repeating this process until he had pieced together a complete enough picture for Marie or when his headache would be too intense to continue, whichever came first.