Chapter Text
Scar stepped through the doorway of Cub's rooms in Aqua Tower.
"Cub?" he called out.
"In here!" The voice came from Cub's study, so Scar headed in.
Cub, at his desk, leaned back in his chair, pushing up his glasses with a finger. "Was your afternoon very productive? Because mine sure wasn't."
"It was - so why don't you start? Save the best for last, and all," Scar suggested.
Cub flicked one of his screens so that it spun to face Scar. There were a handful of photos of pages of a notebook, with quotes from and descriptions of witnesses written on them in Cub's neatish shorthand depicted. Most of the quotes seemed to be along the lines of 'Sorry, I don't know anything.'
"Nearly no one actually looked out their windows that night, and those who did didn't see much, because it was dark or they didn't want to get involved in anything that would put them at risk. All I've learned is that there were probably no more than three attackers, likely just two, and that the gun was very well silenced. We pretty much already knew all that." Cub sighed. "Please tell me you actually found something useful."
"Well, it's not exceptional, but I got this." Scar held out the drive - was that an accurate term? Scar wasn't a tech guy, that was what he had Cub for - and explained the issue with the password.
Cub reached out and took it, inspecting it. "I'll have to spend some time hacking my way into this..." Cub seemed almost excited at the idea, then sighed with slight disappointment. "...or I could do the smart thing and send it to the Association Tech Department, since password recovery isn't my area of expertise and I'm more useful elsewhere."
"Yeah... you should probably do that." Scar felt a little bad that Cub wouldn't be able to do any of the tech-y stuff he found so fun, but they were on a pretty tight time limit.
Cub nodded, and the two of them went back to work.
~*~
Scar walked into Cub's study, holding his breath - until he saw the same tense hope on Cub's face as he was sure was on his own.
His shoulders slumped. "Let me guess: nothing new?"
Cub shook his head. "I've spoken to everyone who lived on the street Grian ran through now, and none of them saw anything. I've even spoken to people who were away on vacation at the time!"
Scar flopped into the chair across from Cub, slouching down. "I've spoken to all the shop owners from that last street. None of them had any information. Ron was the only one with any security cameras in that alleyway..."
They sank into a dark, exhausted silence.
Scar broke it after a moment. "Two weeks. Two weeks, and we have nothing new. That's half our time, and we've got nothing! There was a trail! Right into Big Ron's! They'll have cleaned up after themselves by now..." He rubbed his forehead. The only thing that had turned up was Grian's phone - but it was utterly destroyed, beyond giving them any information.
"There has to be something else we can look into..." Cub muttered, staring somewhat blankly at his screens.
"It seems like whoever did this covered up their tracks fairly well after that first night..." Scar put his head into his hands. "I don't know if there'll be anything left, with how much time we've given these monsters to hide their trail."
"At the very least, you can go talk to Ron again. You mentioned you thought he might have been hiding something," Cub advised. "And while you're doing that, I can head over to the tech department and see how it's going with those security tapes."
Scar glanced at him, then nodded. He couldn't give up, not until his month was over.
~*~
Cub walked into the Aqua Tower Tech Department.
It was a large room, full of desks with computers, pieces of computers, phones, tablets, and their parts, other technological paraphernalia, and the people working on them.
Cub worked his way through the organizedly-messy room, looking for someone in charge.
Once upon a time, he'd wanted to work down here. He enjoyed working with computers and other technology, but it felt... disconnected. He hadn't felt close to the purpose of the Association when in the tech department.
Eventually, his skill for PR and knowledge of vex abilities had given him an out, and he'd ended up Scar's PR manager. He liked the interaction with the people, the ones they were working to protect, much better. And he often ended up doing non-PR-related things for Scar, usually anything to do with tech, since Scar was... well, Scar. So he wasn't missing out on much.
After a few moments of searching, Cub located the head of the tech department - talking to a tech working on some strange glove - and walked over.
"Hey," he said once she stepped away from the tech. "I submitted the logs from a security camera to be hacked into, about two weeks ago. Are there any updates on that?"
She finished inputting a few notes on the tablet she held then glanced at him. "I'll have to check. Did we give you any designations or other categorization information?"
Cub told her the designation the techs had given him two weeks ago, and she searched it on her tablet.
She skimmed whatever document she'd pulled up, slightly mouthing words as she did, then looked up at Cub. "It looks like this log was rather low priority. It was a project we gave to bored employees with too much time on their hands to work on - which we didn't have all that many of, what with all those specialised-villain disasters. We're very busy people, so this got shoved to the side."
"Ah." Cub nodded, somewhat to himself. "I assume there will be no changing that?" Cub knew how the Association's techs could be. There was always a lot for them to work on, so their priorities could get very firm.
At the woman's semi-apologetic shake of her head, Cub continued. "Then I'd like to take the logs back - to work on them myself, you know?"
"Probably a good idea," she agreed, then gestured with her stylus. "Go talk to the guys in Categorisation. They can get you your security logs back, and make sure everything's properly tracked so no one panics and thinks they've been stolen."
Cub nodded, and headed off to the back of the room, where Categorisation was.
~*~
"I need you to tell me if there is anything - anything at all, no matter how insignificant it may seem - else you haven't told me, related to Grian and Mumbo's disappearances."
Scar had returned to Big Ron's Tech Superstore, and was leaning on the sales counter, the radio quietly buzzing through his conversation with Ron himself.
"I don't know if there's anything else I haven't already told you," Ron sighed.
Scar suppressed a sigh of his own. The atmosphere surrounding this case was depressing enough, no need to let his own despair show. "That's- fine. Perfectly fine. I'll just... have to interview all your employees again. Maybe they'll have remembered something by now." Scar straightened and started to walk away.
A phrase from the radio filled the silence left by the end of their conversation. "...hero 'the King' was put out of commission by another dangerous battle against the up-and-coming villain Cyborg, who..."
"Wait, wait." Ron raised a hand, almost unconsciously. "I... might have something. It's- it's a little far-fetched, purely conjecture, but... better than nothing?" He didn't seem overly sure of that fact.
Scar turned back to him, waving for him to continue.
Ron took a quick breath. "You've heard of Cyborg, yes? How he showed up and started fighting specifically the King, and continuously winning? Well... I, uh... I think he might be Mumbo."
"What?" Scar asked. "How? And... Why?"
"They have incredibly similar builds - the only differences were obviously caused by Cyborg's... cyborg-ness. All the tech integrated with him. But it's not just that - that would be an insane leap of logic, I would never bring that up to you!" Ron fidgeted with one of his shirt buttons. "The King... he's the one who got Mumbo's parents killed. It was an accident, the entire family understands that, but... If someone wanted to turn Mumbo against the Heroes' Association, they'd probably use revenge against the King as a motivator.
"And- and on top of both those things, Mumbo's always been an absolute genius when it came to redstone, like the Cyborg is. He made robots, even near-intelligent ones. With enough time, and more resources than I could ever have given him, it's possible he could have turned himself into a cyborg." Ron's eyes flicked up to Scar's, then back down to the buttons he was twisting between his fingers. "I... could be wrong, though..."
"It's... a theory. I'll probably look into it. I... don't have anything else to look into right now," Scar confessed. Then he paused, something Ron had said clicking in his head. "'If someone wanted to turn Mumbo against the Heroes' Association'. Why do you say it like that, and not just 'if Mumbo turned against the Heroes' Association'?"
"Oh." Ron rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, I just find it hard to believe that Mumbo would turn against the Association on his own. He always seemed pretty okay with them, for someone whose parents were killed by a member. And we - we being his family - have always encouraged him to believe that they don't mean harm, and what happened with his parents was just an accident. He actually seemed to idolise quite a few of the heroes.
"I think, if Mumbo is Cyborg, then he didn't change fully on his own. Someone else was involved, someone who made him change his opinions of the Association. Who probably gave him the funds and supplies to make himself into a cyborg. And then also the funds and supplies for his other tools and things he uses to fight.
"And... on top of that, I wonder if whoever may have turned Mumbo into a villain might be doing the same to Grian."