by Tom Jones
Jason was now looking around the house, and he did speak to the fox while he did so, “Say, isn’t this the place where our human here was staying?” Arcades remembered why they came to the house in the first place, “Yeah. That’s right. It is.” The wolf looked back down at the fox, “Well, don’t you suppose that there may be some hidden secrets scattered ‘round here that we don’t quite know about?” The fox glanced around the room which the three of them were currently in, but Arcades could not see anything too interesting, “It’s a possibility. We might as well check things out while we’re here. Maybe we’ll find some information that’ll let us in on who sent these guys to come and get me.” The wolf looked back at the lifeless corpse on the ground, “Do you think the Foundation is still out there to get you, or do you think some other group sent these guys?” Arcades shrugged, “We don’t have anything too conclusive right now. I know that this guy said the Foundation isn’t around anymore, but I’m a little hesitant to believe that. I’m not thinking he was being too truthful when talking with us.” Jason agreed with the fox, “Yeah, I’m with you on that one, mate.” Arcades concluded with a remark, “It’s kinda hard to know if you’re telling the truth or not when your whole career revolves around an organization shrouded in lies and deception.” The wolf gave a nod to agree with the fox. If there were answers within the house, they were determined to find them.
Chapter 13
Mystery Contribution
“Do you think that’s deep enough?” Jason asked the fox as he rammed the blade of his shovel into the ground. Arcades looked into the hole and looked back at the deceased human who was wrapped up in a blue tarp which they found inside of the house, “Maybe we can make it a little more deeper. I don’t want anybody finding him anytime soon.” The wolf picked the shovel back up and then asked, “Do you reckon the Foundation’s already on their way to look for him? What about the other guy who’s dead out in that clearing we came from?” Arcades took his own shovel and assisted Jason in digging the grave they were going to bury the human in, “There’s really no telling for whether or not that’s going to happen. To be safe, though, we shouldn’t waste any time out here. The faster we can get this scene cleaned up, the more time we’re going to have to evade the Foundation when they do become suspicious.” Arcades was standing in the hole with the wolf while they continued to dig. Jackie was sitting on the ground outside of the hole, but she was watching the two anthros dig in silence. The vixen also was sitting as far away from the body as she could; she did not want to sit near the human who attempted to kill her, even if he was deceased.
The fox paused from his digging, stood up straight, and he looked to the left to see how deep the hole currently was. Since Arcades stood at six feet tall, he was using himself as a reference point to judge the depth of the hole as it was. Jason noticed that Arcades had stopped digging, so the wolf stopped digging to look up at the fox. “What’s up, mate?” Jason asked as he planted the blade of the shovel back into the ground once more. Arcades answered the wolf’s question when he finished judging the depth of the hole, “Just checking how deep we are right now.” Jason looked at the fox’s head and looked at the sides of the hole, “Well, it's about coming up to your neck right now.” The fox nodded in response and said, “Yep. I’d like for it to be just a bit over my head. I’m pretty sure these graves are supposed to be six feet deep anyways. I don’t want to put him in a shallow grave and have him be found later.” Jason looked at the length of the hole and said, “Well, he’d be lying down in it. That’s why we dug this hole to be this long.” Arcades nodded as he proceeded to dig again, “Yep, but we still need to have the hole be six feet deep.” Jason looked up at the sky right as he got back to digging, and he could see that some time had noticeably passed since they began digging the grave in the first place, “How long do you reckon we’ve been out here, Kurt?” Arcades replied, but he did not look up at the sky to judge the time for himself, “Well, if I had to guess… I’d say it’s been a good hour and some change, but I could be wrong. I don’t have a watch on me.”
As the two anthros continued to dig the hole deeper, Arcades began to speak again, “When we finish this up out here, we still need to go back inside the house and clean up the blood that was left behind.” The wolf thought back to the aftermath of the human’s demise, and he knew that there was indeed a decent amount of cleaning that needed to be done, “How long is that gonna take?” Arcades replied while still digging, “I want to say probably the same amount of time this has been taking. If you’d like, one of us could search the house for anything interesting while you or I take care of the cleaning. Otherwise, we can both clean and we’ll be able to look around for clues after we’re done with that. Which do you want to do?” The wolf’s eyes moved upwards and fixated on a random point in the hole as he considered the options which the fox had just given to him. After a couple seconds, Jason made his decision, “How about us two do it together?” Arcades gave a nod to the wolf without pausing his digging, “Sure thing. Who knows what kind of stuff they have hidden in there about the Foundation?” Jason returned a comment, “That is, if they have stuff in there to begin with.” Arcades replied once more, “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
“The prototype is now combat-operational again,” an MJ12 agent reported to his superior. The Majestic One replied, “Excellent. Do we have a unit that will be able to pilot it if we need it?” The agent nodded, “Yessir. The same Mobile Task Group unit who took it from CDI in the first place is on station and ready to pilot it.” The Majestic One took in a deep breath before speaking again, “Any word on CDI? Any reason to believe they have found the location of this facility?” The agent shook his head, “No sir. However, we do not have insider information on CDI to begin with. After a more extensive search of the vehicle was performed, we were unable to find anything related to remote tracking. As far as we know, CDI has no idea where the prototype currently is.” The Majestic One now was interested in the security status of the facility, “Are our railguns operational?” The agent nodded, “Yes sir. They are operational and ready to deploy when we need them.” The Majestic One remembered that he did recall all field agents to return back to the main facility, “Have our agents made it back yet?” The agent reported, “For the most part, they have. The last remaining group should arrive here in the next couple of hours. The only agents which have not responded were these two that we sent to find the fox Florida. They’ll probably reply sooner or later.”
The Majestic One shook his head when he heard the fox mentioned again, “That damn fox. So much effort was put into trying to get him, and it didn’t even work. We couldn’t find him. I’m trying to figure out how a fox like that is able to evade the units we sent his way.” The agent was unsure of what his superior was implying, “Do you want us to send more units back out there?” The Majestic One shook his head, “No. We still need them here to defend the facility if CDI attacks. They’ll have to stay here for a week or two, and then we’ll send them back into the field again.” The agent was wondering what his superior had in mind for the field agents once the heightened state of alert expired, “Are we going to try and look for the fox again after that?” The Majestic One quickly replied, “No. He’ll definitely be long gone at that point. It was probably already too late when he abandoned the place he lived at. I sincerely doubt he’d return. Besides, if it wasn’t us who got him, I’m sure the police force composed of mostly humans would be wondering why there are dead gunmen inside of his residence. It would simply be too hard for us to find him at this point. The most we can do now is just suppress any information about us that arises from him, but I don’t think that any leaks will be happening since most of the leaks in the first place were about the Omega Foundation.”
Once The Majestic One finished speaking, he sat in silence while his subordinate continued to stand and wait for his orders. The Majestic One spoke again, “It was probably a mistake for us to even bother with that whole ordeal
again. I’m pretty sure he only knew about the Foundation. But at the same time, it’s still all fucked because we were so close with the Foundation. We had almost everything we needed to proceed with Agenda 2030, but now… It’s 2030, and we’re nowhere near where we were supposed to be at. You do remember what the Omega Foundation was supposed to be for, right?” The agent replied, “Yes sir. The Omega Foundation was supposed to develop an army that would be completely loyal to us.” The Majestic One shrugged, “Well, that was part of it. They were also developing things like the XMP-1 and the XVP-1 that we were going to use to push through with a massive takeover after the Great Reset played out, but I’m sure you know that got delayed as well. And without the Foundation, it’ll take us decades before we’ll be ready to commence with something on the scale of Agenda 2030 again. CDI’s only making it more difficult for us as well. We don’t have any share in their organization anymore. That all went to shit just around the same time the Foundation went to shit.”
The Majestic One stopped speaking once again, and he thought about all of the assets and infrastructure they had lost during the course of the Invisible War. The human gave out a long sigh and asked his subordinate a question, “Do you know how much we’ve lost?” The agent was not exactly familiar with all of the dealings of the Omega Foundation, “I cannot say I know the full extent of that, sir.” The Majestic One began to continue his rant, “Well… One of the most important things we lost was Facility Eleven. Facility Eleven was the way we were able to get those anthro subjects to us in the first place. You see, it all seemed to go to shit once we started to try and branch out to get anthros that did not sign up for this. Now, the Attack on Berlin from ‘28 served more purposes than just to get anthros for the Foundation, but it was with that event which directly preceded Facility Eleven’s infiltration. For decades, we have been influencing the mainstream media to corrupt the core social psychology and mindsets of people at large. We’ve turned humans against anthros, and we have all but made anthros into one repulsive group despised by both humans as well as their own kind. It actually became relatively easy for anthros to simply volunteer to show up at Facility Eleven. To them, they believed it to be some kind of exciting sexual retreat, but of course, they didn’t know that they’d end up at the Foundation.”
The Majestic One paused, and the agent stood by trying to decide whether or not his superior was waiting for some type of response. After a moment of silence, the agent gave his input in the form of a comment, “The media sure is a great weapon.” The Majestic One gave a firm nod, “Absolutely. Media influence was one of our greatest assets. We were able to morph a society into one which has no moral boundaries and little regard for one another. All the while, we kept people scared with constant threats of international affairs and events which we threw into the mix to really drive it home. I mean, the Attack on Berlin was one of the major events which we had for that purpose. I say it would’ve been better if information didn’t get leaked, but I guess we shouldn’t have had as many Foundation personnel mixed into the NSS. The Foundation was already quite understaffed as it was, and we did not think that it would get out of hand after that. We practically had no chance of fighting CDI in a direct battle: They have plenty more men and weapons than the Foundation did. That’s why we ended up just giving the order to kill as many of the anthros as we could once we knew that a facility was compromised. I think we got most of them, but maybe a few got out. At least the silver lining is that some of the more trained anthros wouldn’t last as long on their own. I mean, shit… Some of those anthros were so obedient that they wouldn’t even eat unless we told them they could do that. If those guys got out, they’d just starve to death after a while.”
The agent nodded to assure The Majestic One that he was indeed listening to what he was telling him, “Sounds like we were pretty close to that super-obedient army.” The Majestic One replied, “Definitely. We eventually got to the point where the Foundation was able to breed them all inhouse at Facility Zero. They would’ve been ready for Agenda 2030 if it wasn’t for the sudden attack. However, at that point, CDI was basically looking for new facilities anyways. Even though I don’t think anybody really paid them to attack our facilities, they were still ready to get rid of the Foundation with little hesitation.” The agent was wondering why a company of the likes of CDI would go after the Foundation on their own discretion, “Who do you think told them to do that?” The Majestic One did not have a definite answer, but he did try to answer the question to the best of his ability, “I don’t think they were hired by anyone. They might’ve seen us as competition, and they wanted to get us out of the picture. After all, there wouldn’t really be too much we would have even been able to do in order to stop them. CDI has become too large of a force for us to deal with, and without the Foundation, we’d definitely be vulnerable to an attack. If we had the anthro army finished in time, then maybe we’d have more of a fighting chance.” The agent gave a slow nod and spoke in response, “At least with that prototype, we’re not starting entirely from scratch.” The Majestic One sighed, “That still doesn’t change the fact that we’re still very far behind schedule. CDI’s strength will only continue to increase. We’ll have to find a way to work at them in the coming years.” The agent tried to reassure his superior that the Illuminati would rebuild all that was lost, “I’m sure we’ll catch up sooner or later.” The Majestic One felt confident that the agent was correct.
“I suppose it’s good that there were enough cleaning supplies here. Made our job a whole lot easier. Isn’t that right, Kurt?” Jason asked the fox once the two of them had just finished cleaning up the mess that remained after the human’s death. Arcades agreed with the wolf, “Always nice. Do you think they had this stuff in here for a reason?” The wolf looked back towards the floor, and he could hardly see the spot where the human had died, “Well… These guys were from the Foundation. They probably were expecting to have to rough somebody up, or maybe even kill someone.” Arcades began to shrug, but he stopped himself halfway through the motion, “You know, it doesn’t really add up in my opinion. These guys weren’t like the Foundation we encountered two years ago. The Foundation seemed way more organized than these guys were. Besides, the Foundation took us alive, and that’s not what this guy seemed to plan on doing.”
Jackie sat on the couch as she silently watched Jason and Arcades discuss the situation. The wolf said, “But don’t you remember what that bogan said? He said that the Foundation wasn’t a thing anymore.” Arcades did remember hearing the late human proclaim as such, but he was skeptical as to whether or not the human was telling the truth, “Yeah, I remember that, but can we really take his word for it? I don’t think he was being honest with us, and quite frankly, I don’t think we heard any truth out of him. When your whole job revolves around working for a secret society shrouded in a huge lie, I’m not sure how much you should take as factual.” Jason looked directly at the fox, “How about we begin our search now and see what all we can dig up? We’ve ought to find something in here, hopefully. If we don’t, at least we can breathe a bit easier knowing that there’s one less guy who’s out trying to get us.” Arcades was not as optimistic as Jason was, “Either that, or we just gave away our location. I don’t think that’s really a battle we have a great chance of winning. We barely made it out of Alabama in one piece. We were very fortunate to not run into anything which significantly hindered our escape.”
The wolf canted his head to the right slightly, and he reached out his right hand before placing it on the fox’s shoulder, “Kurt… Are you forgetting what you spent so much time telling me about?” Arcades was beginning to quickly realize what Jason was talking about, but he remained silent in order to let the wolf speak, “You always would tell me that all we need to do is to trust in the Lord to help us get through our trials and troubles. If God wants us to make it out of this without the likes of the Foundation or whoever chasing our tails, then He’ll make it happen. Have you forgotten tha
t?” Arcades’ face turned into a frown as his eyes began to trail downwards. The wolf kept his hand on the fox’s shoulder, and he waited for Arcades to say what he wanted to say. After a bit of a pause, Arcades said, “I know, Jason, and I’m sorry. This week has just been so much of a rush. We went from just carrying on like we had been for the past year, and now -- we’re practically homeless with nowhere to really go. We even have these guys who were out here to find us --” Arcades was interrupted by the wolf tugging on his shoulder, “Come on Kurt. Let’s have a seat.”
The fox went silent as the wolf brought him to sit on the couch that was next to the one which Jackie occupied. The vixen did not have anything to add, so she just simply sat in silence as she continued watching. After the two anthros sat themselves down on the couch, Jason broke the silence, “Kurt, doesn’t it not even really matter what happens to us here? I mean, at the worst, they kill us, yes, but what does that do to us? Since we’re both saved, we’ll just be resurrected and come back to live forever. We shouldn’t forget that the best is still yet to come. Eternity is definitely going to last a lot longer than our lives on this Earth.” Arcades still had a frown on his face, but he knew that what the wolf said was true, “You’re right, Jason. I should’ve kept that in mind.” Jason placed his hand on the fox’s shoulder again, “But Kurt, I’m glad that you’ve still been here with me for all this time. Like I’ve said, you’re the brother I wish I had in the first place.” Arcades frown finally morphed into a small smile, and the fox turned his head ever so slightly to the left so that he would be able to see the wolf with a bit more than his peripheral vision, “Thanks, Jason.”
