[AlumiuN]

AlumiuN sits at his desk, lit only by the harsh artificial glare of his laptop. He glances at the clock in the corner of the screen.

11:32 am, May 8, 2015

He looks back to the centre of his screen and continues his previous incomprehensible and self-targeted rambling as his brain processes the information on his screen.

"Hmm... wouldn't have thought... what's that... oh... maybe my - no, I... hmmm..."

He suddenly sits bolt upright before returning to his previous hunched position and scratching his day-old stubble.

"Freon?"

He presses a small button on the side of a USB device plugged into his laptop, and the cube reappears in the centre of the room, emanating a foreboding hum and emitting its already familiar sterile, cool blue. He runs his hand along the side of the cube, and a panel is revealed. He presses a yellow button with a downwards arrow on it repeatedly, before pressing a small green button on the side. It beeps in response, and the cool blue is slowly replaced by a blood red as he walks over and quickly puts on a metallic cleansuit that was standing in the corner of the room. As the void surrounding two floors of detached apartment begins to expand and fade into a depressing view of a obliterated city, he picks up a small Geiger counter off his desk and turns it on. It clicks expectantly, before displaying the standard '5'.
A sudden flash of light illuminates the room, and the void disappears. The abandoned cars beneath the apartment that now exists in real space collapse under the weight, and the Geiger counter needle spikes for a second, before settling on '10'.

"One milliroentgen? ONLY ONE?"

The temperature sensor in the cleansuit begins to beep as it registers that the temperature is a mere 7 degrees Celcius.

"So it was a freon-based bomb. Whoever threw this bomb at us had some serious money and scientific support - more than Brazil, Iran and North Korea could ever muster, even if they combined their efforts."
"HEY! Who's using this radio channel!" comes a harsh voice through the suit speaker.
"What? Oh, sorry. I must've forgotten to turn the radio off."
"Son, this is a NORAD channel. Why is it on your radio?"
"I have no idea, sir. This is the first time I've used this out of R&D."
"R&D? By any chance, did you work at Standard?"
"Yes, sir. Abandonia City."
"Let me guess - B-class cleansuit."
"Yes."
"Well. I'm glad to know someone survived that. Anyway, what was that you were saying about freon?"
"I think the bombs that hit here were freon-based, sir. I picked up traces from some pieces of shrapnel in the spectrometer, and it's only 7 degrees Celsius here."
"What sort of radiation level?"
"Negligible. Only double normal background rad levels."
"Hmmm. I'll get what's left of us to see what we can dig up. In the meantime, there's someone over on a island about 10 kilometres off the coast that we've been in contact with since. Those B-class suits have the Zerospace uplink and the hoverjets, don't they?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'll send you the co-ordinates. I want you to meet him."

AlumiuN jumps out of the window onto the ground a metre below and looks around.

"OK. I'll make my way over there now."
"Good. Ucks out."

AlumiuN begins walking twoards the coast.