The party woke up in a detention center manned by uniformed guards and a detective named Alan Thornton. Alan interviewed each person separately; however, after asking some questions, he let the three of them go with their equipment. Including the contract Basil had on Jarvis's “excommunication”. It was mentioned in discussion that the three of them were found at ground zero of the blast site…

The party snuck into the damaged research center, which was apparently still in operation – and noted that it was 5:27pm on Wednesday, and 4:20pm Monday was roughly the time they last remember things from. They managed to sneak in past a manager heading out for a smoke break (after stealing his cigarettes and lighter), and explored enough to find an engineer's 'secret stash' lockpack containing a vending card with over 300 Scale on it, and various lunches. A lunch with Jarvis's name on it turned out to have a poison needle trap on it (which Astor promptly triggered by accident.)

The trio went to check Marcus's office, and discovered several important things: one, that Marcus was a very unimportant manager who thought of himself as very important, two, that he had a lot of papers that he didn't read, three, that he had stupidly left his ID badge in his desk in a locked drawer, and four, that he kept his password in his desk on a folded piece of paper. It wasn't 1234, but it still wasn't too bright. Accessing Marcus's computer, the party managed to snag his contact list and emails for the past few days, including an urgent email from Anthony Twain (Security Department) telling people to evacuate to the north end of the compound at Monday 4:21pm, and an urgent management memo from Jasmine McGonnagall at 6:35pm on Monday to meet offsite at a given address on Tuesday afternoon, no reason given. The party copied these onto an Armex Machina UDT drive they found in his desk, which also had an Armex pricelist on it for optical sensors and targeting equipment (likely from a trade show.)

When Marcus returned, Jarvis distracted him by asking when they would get equipment back up in the labs, to which a flustered Marcus told “Harvey” that they were doing the best they could. Once he had bought time for his colleagues to escape, they slipped up to the second floor and into a lab, where they discovered that the 'explosion' had left a clear hole - no rubble, no debris anywhere, just a point where building was, and a point where building wasn't.