"Alright, what are y'all thinking?"
"Revenant."
"Oh, definitely."
"It can only be a revenant."
"And why is a revenant?" Tussle asks, folding his arms behind his back.
"Because only a revenant is so blandly normal that you can't figure out what it is for five freaking hours," Snow says first, glaring at his screens.
The past week and a half has been wonderful for the interns' growth. Not only can they now identify most every ghost by behavior alone, they find the evidence-based runs completely boring, have gained a lot of confidence, and know how to loop the ghosts... or hide, if they choose that route.
Even forcing them to randomly rotate jobs doesn't hinder them, which is great. He's already run the tests to check solo runs, and the most they need is to add a custom duration before the first hunt begins. Too aggressive of a ghost will keep them from getting what they need into the map fast enough, which is the only thing that prevents them from surviving long enough. Once they get stuff inside, they're just a little slow, that's all.
"So, what can we do for this run?"
It's no-evidence, the Hospital since that's the largest map available, and on the hardest customization he could manage. Doing it with four people is pretty impressive for VV employees, and there are only three people recorded to ever do it solo.
Tussle is one, of course, and Len is another. He doesn't know the third, but he knows that even established duos struggle with the intensity of the most aggressive of spirits in the most difficult of situations.
"We got the records, we got some bones and ectoplasm, we got the little cursed doll-"
"Voodoo doll."
"-and, of course, we have the fact that this thing loves to flip the breaker."
The map of lights has, in the past few hours, turned off so often that Thrasher had taken up post beside it after a while. Given it never walked near and merely turned the thing off from afar, he was quite safe.
Merely annoyed like the other two.
"Which means," Sparky finishes for their ice queen, "we might as well deposit on the computer and send ourselves off. This revenant is the worst."
He laughs at them, just to get their glares directed at him. Instead of letting them get too worked up (more than he's already allowed them), he goes to the button and closes the van. It gets them to instantly double-check they recorded their guesses, but then they just go to sit down and wait.
The van doesn't move.
The doors close, but they don't have the blip of darkness before appearing at base. Instead, Tussle frowns and opens his eyes to figure out what's wrong.
"Did the sim glitch or something? Is this one of the bugs we have to report?"
"Potentially," he hedges, because bugs usually aren't actual bugs. They're issues with the spirit world, issues with the investigators, issues with things that are outside the scope. He hasn't been taking the interns on actual sims, though.
No one can force him to do those when the real deal is available. That means that, for whatever reason, the van's autopilot isn't working.
"Hold on, I'll see what I can do. Stay inside, okay?"
He goes over to the button and presses it.
The doors remain closed.
He presses it again. And again. And again.
Even giving thirty seconds for it to catch up, nothing happens. That means they're stuck in the back. Stuck in the back, but the contract is over, they've deposited things to VV's servers-
To put it simply, this shouldn't be happening.