2024-06-24: The Ruins As They Were
- Cutscene: The Ruins As They Were
- Cast: Milly Ashford
- Where: Asticassia - TA's Office, Asticassia - Grassley House
- Date: 2024-06-24
- Summary: Milly gets a shocking phone call during her TA office hours, in the wake of the Mobile Doll base assault.
Sitting in a cubicle amid a room full of them in Asticassia's Front, Milly taps a pen at her chin. Grading papers... it's a necessary task, but not one she's much enthused about. Her eyes lid just slightly as she flips her pen around to the stylus side, swiping up to check something on the rubric before she docks a point.
"... We're not grading on that?" she asks the air, blinking a few times. "I'm not sure I'm crazy about --"
Her phone rings. She looks at the number -- obscured. Raising her phone to her ear and answering, she says, "Hello?"
Almost immediately, she stands up and starts moving away from her desk. "Why, I'd love to hear about the Neo-Britannia Reinvestment Project," she says, keeping her voice level as she starts to make her way out, making a beeline for Grassley House. "Thank you so much for calling!" she continues, as she walks; after another pause, she elaborates, "I'd been under the impression I was on the Do Not Call List, but this is a new phone, so that's my mistake. It seems like a pretty good mistake, too, if I'm getting this opportunity."
Step, step, step. She takes up a position to the side of the House, her voice ducking slightly. "If you're calling during the day, I can tell this is important. What's this really --"
Her voice stops dead.
She blinks. "It's gone? What do you mean, it's gone? Are you sure they already uploaded it?" This has to be a mistake, she got incredible footage. "Luo Chen said that the outpost near Shenzhen could..."
The Ashford scion (for how little that matters, now) slumps into the outer wall of Grassley House. She ducks her voice a little more. "Just to make sure I have this right -- within two hours of upload, they scrubbed the footage, traced it back to Shenzhen, wiped out all three M4Fs and all ten ops personnel. And we don't know how they did it."
Milly's grip on her phone tightens, and she lets out an exasperated, "... I have one backup. We'll do this the slow way through less monitored channels. No one uploads anything to the Network until we know there's at least 3000 copies." Excessively cautious, perhaps. "And... try to get in contact with Diethard. He's got one of the best shots at figuring out how this happened."
A pause, and then one final directive: "I'll put the backup in the usual place. ... Please don't take any unnecessary risks."
Milly hangs up. ... She's still got to grade all those papers, too. No choice but to get back to it. She'll report this to the Prince... after churning through all of that.