"Tussle? What's going on?"
He turns with a smile, keeping his shoulders loose and his stance open. They don't need to know. They don't know, and that's one of the issues. He's not about to let on the truth, not when he planned to have his team help out. Even just having one of his floormates would keep the interns from panicking.
"Don't worry, I think it might be a surprise. I don't tend to read the updates or logs or anything, so for all I know, this is meant to happen and I'm overreacting."
They give him weird looks.
Those weird looks turn into startled bewilderment as they feel the van start moving. Without them having their vision go dark to be the end-of-contract.
"Oh, yeah, that seems right. I was thinking, if this isn't letting us out, but we also can't end the contract, they must've put a new section. Maybe we finally get to exorcise the ghosts ourselves!"
He acts excited, even though he has a pit in his stomach.
"Oh, so... we just relax?"
"Yep!"
He settles back into his spot, leaning back and closing his eyes as if this is normal. He waits for the sound of them settling, too, for the sounds of rustling movement to pass.
And then, without changing his expression in the slightest, he panics.
What the hell?! This- They haven't been doing simulations! The autopilot should operate the same way every time! He goes over the briefings before every contract they start, checks that it's the right map, the right difficulty, has the right items prepared-
And now, without any warning, they've had the whole process derailed!
There is no way they'd ever ask interns to exorcise the ghosts, either. Tussle's done it a few times, but he hates that process more than anything. It's built into them all, that feeling when something is forced into the spirit world.
The truth of the matter is that Vesper Vectors has long been hiding a large truth. Never from the employees who are within the processes, not for long and not without good reason. Tussle... Tussle's one of the few that knew before he ever joined.
Learned it the hard way and easy way all at once.
Ghosts are real. The famous VR game everyone knows, Daimon Quaerere, is a real game, but the whole "hyper-realistic ghost-hunting horror" is a front. The extremely selective and hidden process of picking out employees who are paid to test the game?
Some of them test the game. Usually, that's the simulations people use to get interns warmed up.
But the truth is that what they are, what they can do, it's all the reason that VV can even fake the simulations, fake that it's all a game...
Tussle has seen more than his fair share of people realizing the truth, learning of it, and having the existential crisis of realizing they've died ghost-hunting... and it was real.
They came back.
Investigators like them die, come back after, again and again and again, living through contracts and many believing it all a game. Then something happens, something that hints at the truth, and they start to put all the little clues together. When it finally makes the picture, there's a shutdown, a denial, the stages of grief over one's own life.
Tussle never did, but Tussle knew the easy way and the hard way.
He waits and waits, trying to put his mind together, arrange all those little pieces he has of what is going on. The interns eventually slump, and when he can peek and sees them all deep asleep, he stands to pace. He walks to the monitors, he checks the computer, he does everything he can to get something to explain this.
The autopilot, from the little he manages to find, has no registered location. Normally, it's hardwired to go back to headquarters, into the underground garage where it enters the lift to deposit them into the building itself. To both be moving on autopilot and not have a location means something is deliberately masking the truth from them.
However, even when he manages to get into the center of the code that is giving that information, it seems less like hacking and more like an actual hole in the program.
"Da-heck is going on?" he mutters, running a hand through his hair. He needs to figure this out before the van stops or the interns wake-up.
As he's thinking this, he feels the jarring gravity as the van slows, slows, and finally stops.
Scratch that, he needs to figure this out before the interns wake-up.