"I…I help a great philosopher," Giselle says. "I love her." It's like the words are being yanked out of her mouth.
The door opens silently despite its size, and a blast of cold air hits you. Cold can't hurt you unless you freeze solid, but you're still close enough to life that you find the sensation viscerally unpleasant. Giselle, her normally haughty demeanor gone, shrinks away from the cold air. When the door closes again, she's on the other side of it.
Not sure exactly where to go, you pass through a cold room full of brushed steel tanks attached to thick tubes, electrical cables, and laptops propped open on folding metal desks. The next room resembles a meat locker, except the carcasses hung from iron chains aren't cows or pigs, and neat grids delineate the walls and floor.
Dr. Caul is waiting toward the back of the next chamber. She's wearing a plain black lab coat with KXG on the lapel. Here, the grid-like order of the rooms breaks down, replaced by mounds of dirty brown snow that slowly merge with the icy walls. Overhead, fans drive subzero air down onto the snow.
"Good evening, Krarr," the Tremere says. "I've thought long and hard about Prince Lettow's message, and I think I have a solution. I want you to destroy me."
"Then I won't waste time on theatrics."
Caul picks her way over the dirty snow. After a moment she reaches elbow-deep into it and hauls out a naked woman, who stares at you blankly. With her face slack instead of animated, you barely recognize Invidia Caul. The real Caul gets the…corpse clone?…into a lab coat. The clone's feet are black with blood and decorated with Giselle's runes. No wonder the witch could barely stand.
"When the Camarilla banned most forms of electronic communication," the real Dr. Caul says, "Clan Tremere thought it could just build an occult network. But that was 'hacked,' too. That's how Giselle found me. She and I are good friends now, of course, but it was clear to me that Thaumaturgy invented centuries ago was as vulnerable as any other old and unsecured communication protocol. My original plan was to use my clones as couriers, both in the normal fashion and by encoding them with information that could be read through genome analysis. But they never quite worked, and, well, it seems Prince Lettow disagrees with my work here anyway."
She takes a moment to master her rage. Then she goes on. "You're familiar with the Second Inquisition, Krarr?"