Needle In A Haystack
Posted on Tue Oct 25th, 2016 @ 4:52am by Commander Jordan Gunning
Mission:
Lie Of Omission
Location: Mantovani Plaza [Archa IV]
Standing in the little square, just off one of Peluu's many rolling boulevards, Jordan Gunning was struck by the incredible difference between resorts. Some of them catered more to those who wanted a beach holiday, while some had these artificial cities which would allow people to walk around and marvel at some of the galaxy's wonders in the one place. Las Vegas in the stars.
It was hideous.
Peluu was home to the Archan Institute, the university on the planet and as such juddered back and forth between understated grandeur and overstated debauchery from street to street. Mantovani plaza wouldn't have looked out of place in an Italian city with its attractive storefronts and pavement cafés where students drank strange looking hot drinks from every point on the compass.
Lazlo was yet to come back to him with anything concrete and campus security, the laughable police force of the Institute, were going to take a few hours to come through with the identification chip records. That gave Gunning the opportunity to hit the streets and see if he could dig anything up. He looked at the map of the zone on his PADD. Fat chance, he thought. The zone spread out for miles in every direction and there were more dive bars, drug dens and brothels in these back streets than there were on a Ferengi outpost planet. Students at the Institute were catered to in every conceivable way. They all received a basic income, meaning that they had disposable income.
Gunning crossed Mantovani Plaza and pulled his collar up as the wind started to pick up, blowing dust up from the paving stones and toward the fountain in the centre. He held the photograph of the young man, Murak Sazarel, out to a couple of the students drinking the incredibly odd drinks. They shook their heads. That would have been too easy.
Summer was in full swing on Archa IV, although you wouldn't have known it in this area of Peluu, and decorations were put up in the streets for the festival of Carrianan. The Archans would have you believe it dated back thousands of years to the very dawn of their civilisation but the truth was that it had 'arrived' with the tourist trade. The celebration of... no-one really knew... was an excellent excuse for millions of people to descend on the planet and drink a lot of alcohol.
It was going to make finding a needle in a haystack more like finding a microbe in a galaxy. Brilliant.
The gumshoe knew he wasn't going to make much progress with nothing to go on and found himself pushing open the door to one of the little bars on the Plaza. Little did he know things were about to get a whole lot stickier...
Jordan Gunning
Private Investigator
