Division 13 Case File 013-014: The Omnius Key

When a recovered artifact is finally translated, Division 13 uncovers evidence that challenges everything they thought they knew about the war they are fighting.

The message, written by a figure from a civilization older than recorded human history, speaks of an ancient darkness, a sleeping witness, and a mysterious artifact known only as the Omnius Key.

As the team struggles to understand the implications of the discovery, they devise a dangerous plan to expose the mole operating within Sentinel PRIME’s ranks. But when the trap is sprung, the answers they uncover raise an even more unsettling possibility:

What if Division 13 isn’t discovering the truth?

What if they’ve been guided toward it all along?

Case File 013-014 expands the mythology of the Daemon Universe and reveals the first clues to a mystery that began long before humanity’s recorded history.

Life continues, as life will.

Transcript

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Division 13 Case File Opens

SPEAKER_04 0:00

My name is Hannah Keegan. I'm a lead detective for a top secret New York Police Department Task Force. We're assigned to the unexplained cases that border on the paranormal. This is Division 13, and here are our case files.

A Good Morning With Bad Signs

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Some mornings start well. I had come in early, which was not unusual, made coffee, which was not unusual. Sat at my desk with the case files spread in front of me and stared at them for a while, which was very much not unusual. What was slightly unusual was that I wasn't looking at them with the dread I had developed over the last several months. The feeling of someone who has been staring at a puzzle long enough to start wondering if the pieces belonged to the same box. The raid had done something to that feeling. Not resolved it. Nothing was resolved. But shifted it. We had gone on offense. We had won around. And somewhere in Flatbush, there was a woman with green eyes who had called my personal number this morning and asked if I'd like to get coffee tomorrow. I had said yes before she finished the sentence, which was either encouraging or embarrassing, depending on how you chose to look at it. I was in the process of deciding it was encouraging when Kendrick and Castillo walked through my office door. Their expressions told me the good vibes were about to be interrupted. Cap, Kendrick said. He closed the door behind them. We need to talk about the mole investigation. I set my coffee down. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

It doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Castillo said. She had her arms crossed, which with Castillo meant she had already decided something and was stating it rather than discussing it.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

We've been waiting weeks for something actionable, and we keep getting told the investigation is ongoing. Results are pending. Loretta needs more time.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

She paused.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

Or both.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Castile's voice was controlled, but there was an edge under it.

SPEAKER_03 2:23

And I think Overton being inside that investigation, working directly with Loretta, means we have someone on our side who may not be giving us the full picture either.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Kendrick's jaw tightened. Reina.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

I'm not accusing anyone, Castillo said. I'm stating a concern.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Overton is solid, Kendrick said. He said it with the certainty that comes from knowing someone and trusting them. She's been solid from day one. If she's inside that investigation and not finding anything, it's because there's nothing accessible to find. Not because she's holding back.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

That's a very generous reading, Castillo said sharply.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

It's an accurate one, Kendrick said. The edge between them had a texture I recognized. It was not purely professional. I noted it and filed it without comment.

SPEAKER_03 3:21

You're quick to defend her, aren't you?

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Castillo responded, her annoyance showing.

The Mole Fight Boils Over

SPEAKER_01 3:26

I was about to attempt to diffuse the situation when my office door opened. Overton stood in the frame. Her expression showed she had registered the temperature of the room and chosen not to react to it. Composed, present, giving nothing away about what she had or hadn't heard.

SPEAKER_06 3:46

Sorry to interrupt, she said. Kenny and Russo are asking for the full team in the lab. Loretta's already there.

SPEAKER_04 3:54

They say it's urgent.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

I had seen Donna Russo excited before. She was a good analyst, and good analysts get excited when the data gives them something. But the version of Donna Russo standing in the lab when we arrived was operating at a register I hadn't seen from her. She was almost vibrating. Kenny was more contained about it, the way he was contained about most things, but his eyes were alive in a way that told me he had not slept much and didn't really mind. The tablet sat on the main analysis table, flanked by monitors displaying dense columns of symbols, comparative linguistic charts, and what appeared to be a handwritten grid of translations that covered three full whiteboards along the far wall.

The Tablet Translation Breakthrough

SPEAKER_05 4:51

You called us here?

SPEAKER_01 4:53

We did, Kenny said. He looked at me. We've deciphered the language on the tablet. The room went quiet. Walk us through it, I said.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Kenny turned to the whiteboard. The writing system doesn't function the way modern languages do. Characters don't map to individual letters or even words. They communicate concepts. It reminded me of Japanese kanji, where a single character can carry layered meaning depending on context. The similarity wasn't precise, but it was close enough to give us a foundation. He indicated the grid on the board. Orientation matters. Special symbols preceding or following each character modify the meaning, almost like grammatical markers. Once we understood the modifier system, the rest began to open up.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Less geek in your speak, Kenny, I said. Let's get to the point. Kenny grinned, the grin of someone who had been waiting to be told to skip to the good part and was looking forward to doing just that. You're right, Captain. You all want to know what it says. He turned to Donna. Do the honors? Russo picked up the printout. She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at the room.

SPEAKER_06 6:13

I want to note, she said, that some of these phonetic reconstructions are best estimates. The proper names, especially.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

She looked at the first line.

SPEAKER_06 6:25

The text begins with an identification.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

She began to read. She paused, looked up.

SPEAKER_06 6:34

I'm not certain of the pronunciation. The apostrophes and the spelling indicate glottal stops.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

She returned to the page.

SPEAKER_06 6:42

To those who inherit this world. If these words have reached you, then our age has ended. Know this. Our civilization did not fall because we lacked knowledge. We failed because we forgot our wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Castillo beside me exhaled quietly. The sound a person makes when something lands.

SPEAKER_06 7:07

The darkness you face is not of your making. It is the consequence of ours. This is the curse we have passed on.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Donna paused to clear her throat and then continued.

SPEAKER_06 7:27

At first they will seem to offer power. Ultimately, they will offer only chains and death. They will seek to consume your world.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

I was watching the room. Kendrick had gone still as though something was moving within him, and he didn't want to show it. Overton's pen was in her hand, but she wasn't writing. She was listening with the full-body attention she reserved for things she recognized as important. Loretta near the door had her arms folded and her expression unreadable in the way it got when she was processing.

SPEAKER_06 8:04

Yet all is not lost. Though we pass on our burden, we have also entrusted you with our greatest gift.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Russo paused again here, just a beat, then continued.

SPEAKER_06 8:28

You now hold the first remnant. When many become one, your path will become clear. To awaken the sleeping witness, seek the key of Omnius. We leave this future in your hands. Choose wisely what you become. Life continues as life will.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Russo set down the printout. The lab was very quiet. The hum of the equipment, the distant sound of the city, everything else stripped away. I let it sit for a moment. Let the room hold it. Then I

Omnius Key And The Remnants

SPEAKER_01 9:08

said, So let me get this straight. I looked at the tablet, then at the room. There was an ancient civilization. They fought a war. They lost. They left us a warning. They left us a gift. There's a key. I paused. And we have absolutely no idea what any of it means. Russo opened her mouth. Rhetorical, Donna, I said. She closed it. Kendrick spoke next. The ones who thrive in darkness, they wear many faces. They will offer power. He looked at me. That's the no-born, has to be, the shape-shifting, the infiltration, the neon, power offered, then chains and death.

SPEAKER_06 9:58

The sleeping witness, Overton said.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Her voice was precise and careful. The way it got when she was moving through something she didn't want to get wrong.

SPEAKER_06 10:09

He carries our memory, he carries our hope. That's a person, a specific individual, someone this civilization preserved deliberately for the future.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Kenny, seeming to marvel at the magnitude of it all, quietly spoke. An ancient civilization. His words trailed off into stunned silence. How ancient is ancient? I asked. Do we have any idea? Donna stepped forward.

SPEAKER_06 10:41

Accelerator mass spectrometry results are off the current charts, she said. We can only go back about 50,000 years. The tablet is older than that. Much older. We have to send the tablet to a satellite division in order to test for alternate isotopes.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Seeing what must have been a look of impatience on my face, Donna quickly explained. At this, I felt myself settle a bit. From what I knew of the other divisions operating under the Sentinel Prime umbrella, they seemed to be team players. To Donna, I said, Okay. Just make sure that Division 13 staff stays with the tablet at all times. Clear chain of custody. And it comes back here after testing. We don't lose sight of it for a second. Donna nodded in agreement.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

The first remnant, Castillo said.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

She looked at the tablet.

SPEAKER_03 11:43

That's what we're holding. This isn't just a message. It's a piece of something larger.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

She looked at me.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

The artifact Cole stole from the tomb. That's another piece.

SPEAKER_02 11:55

And the key of Omnius, Kenny said, is presumably what you need to activate both of them. Or all of them, when many become one. We don't know how many pieces there are total. The map from the warehouse may tell us more once we complete that translation.

SPEAKER_05 12:13

We have to assume the nullborn know all of this, Loretta said quietly. They're not just distributing a drug and recruiting human assets, they're assembling something. The same thing we're only just learning about.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

I looked at the tablet, at the ancient markings covering its surface, at the message from someone who had been dead for longer than human civilization had existed, who had written these words into material that would outlast everything they'd ever built, hoping someone on the other end would be ready to receive them. Hoping we would be wise enough to choose differently than they had. I pushed back from the table. Donna, Kenny, outstanding work. Both of you. I looked at them directly so they understood I meant it. This changes everything we thought we knew about what we're dealing with. I turned to Overton, Kendrick, and Castillo. Transport ready in 15 minutes, I'll brief you in the vehicle. Then I turned to Kenny and Loretta. You two, I said, hang back a moment. I need to tell you something.

Navy Yard False Flag Setup

SPEAKER_01 13:25

The old shipbuilding facility sat at the western edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a vast, rusted complex of dry docks and machine shops that had been largely decommissioned and left to the slow work of weather and time. It smelled of salt water and old metal. The kind of place that looks abandoned because it is, but carries the density of somewhere that was once the center of enormous human effort. We parked behind a maintenance building, out of sight from the main approach roads. The team was quiet in the way they got before an operation. Not tense, but focused, conserving. I picked up the radio. We're in place, I said. Send the message. Kenny's voice came back. Sending now. I set down the radio and turned to the team. Here's what we just did, I said. Kenny and Loretta sent a transmission to Sentinel Prime through secure channels marked for distribution to senior staff. The message indicated that we've deciphered the tablet, which is true, and that the translation points to the location of the next remnant. The message says the remnant is here, at the Navy Yard. That part is not true. Kendrick saw it immediately. False flag. Two purposes, I said with a nod. One, whoever in Sentinel Prime feeds that information to the nullborn has just identified themselves by the fact that the nullborn will show up here. The transmission was logged with individual distribution timestamps. Loretta will be able to narrow the leak to a certain window and a specific list of recipients. I looked at them. 2. When the nullborn arrive to secure a remnant that doesn't exist, we will be here waiting for them. I want at least some of them taken alive. Whatever they know about this key of Omnius, about this sleeping witness, about what they're actually building, I want it. Castillo was nodding slowly.

SPEAKER_03 15:40

So we narrow down our suspect list and set a trap with the same transmission.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

If it works, I said, it'll work, Kendrick said. Not wishful thinking, assessment. They've been moving fast since the raid. They know we're getting closer. If they think there's a remnant here, they won't wait. He was right. They didn't wait.

Nullborn Assault And Capture

SPEAKER_01 16:08

They came in two teams, 40 minutes after the transmission went out, which told me two things. The mole was senior enough to receive the message early, and the nullborn had assets staged in the city, ready to move. Both of those things were going to matter later, I noted to myself. The first team came in through the main gate on foot, four figures in civilian clothing, moving with the fluid, slightly wrong gate I had learned to recognize. The second team came from the waterside, three more, having apparently come in by boat and scaled the perimeter wall. We let them get inside the facility before we moved. Now, I said. The Rijin rifles lit up blue in the shadows as the laser designators came on, and then it got fast and ugly and loud in the way these things always are when the element of surprise belongs to you and you use it correctly. Arc rounds are not subtle. The electrical discharge lights the target up and puts them down in the same motion, and in the dim interior of an abandoned shipbuilding facility at four in the afternoon, the blue-white flash of each discharge looked almost beautiful in a deadly way. The nullborn didn't break easily, they never did. Two of them shifted: the obsidian skin, the orange eyes, the full transformation, and moved with the speed that still, even now, required a recalibration of everything training tells you about human capability. One went up the wall of the facility to the catwalk above, skittering with the spider-like movements I had first seen in the grocery store on Marlborough, except faster, more committed. Castillo tracted without hesitating, switched to mode two, and put an explosive round into the catwalk support. The structure gave way and the figure came down hard into the dry dock below, where Kendrick was waiting with two arc rounds that ended the engagement conclusively. Another opened its mouth, that horrible, impossible hinge, and made a sound that wasn't a scream and wasn't language, and was somehow worse than either. Overton shot it twice with arc rounds, and it went down sparking and did not get back up. Let's end this. Explosive rounds. Light them up, I ordered. When it was over, five were down permanently. Two were incapacitated, arc round effects, neuromuscular shutdown, eyes still blazing orange, but bodies refusing to cooperate. I had Kendrick and Castillo get them into restraints before the effects fully wore off. I radioed HQ. Package secured, two for transport, send the containment team.

SPEAKER_02 19:07

Copy that. Good hunting, Captain.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

We waited with the prisoners while

Prisoner Claims We Were Used

SPEAKER_01 19:15

the containment team made its way to us. The two restrained Nullborne were coherent, more coherent than anything we had encountered outside of coal, which confirmed that the iterations were continuing, that the virus was improving, that whatever they were building toward was getting closer to what they actually wanted. They didn't speak for a long time, just watched us with those orange eyes, calculating. Then the one on the left looked directly at me and began to speak. His voice was layered in the way Kohl's was layered. The human voice still there underneath, the virus wrapped around it.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

A raid, a trap, a translation.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

He tilted his head.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

You are reading a letter from the dead and believing it gives you an advantage.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

It gives us information, I said. It gives you questions, he said.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Which is exactly what it was designed to give you.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

The orange eyes were steady and cold.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Kothra Jin was a careful man. He did not leave a map, he left a trail of breadcrumbs for those willing to follow it. You are following it. As intended, as we have always followed it. The difference is that we know more about where it leads. Division 13. All created in response to a single incident that we engineered.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

He looked at the team, at Kendrick, at Overton, at Castillo.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

You believe you are hunters. You have always been instruments. Every case you have closed, every arrest you have made, every piece of evidence you have recovered, it has led you here, to this, to reading the tablet, to beginning to understand what the key is and where it might be found.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

He returned his eyes to me.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

We do not need to defeat Division 13. We need Division 13 to keep doing exactly what it has always done. Find the pieces, assemble the path, lead us to the Lightbringer.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

The containment team arrived. The two prisoners were loaded, restrained into the transport vehicle. The one who had spoken looked at me through the vehicle's small, reinforced window as the doors were sealed. He smiled. The transport pulled away.

Choosing Wisdom Before The Next Move

SPEAKER_01 22:37

I stood in the late afternoon light of the Navy Yard and let the words settle. Kendrick came to stand beside me. He didn't say anything for a moment. I know, I said. Is it working? I watched the transport disappear around the corner of the facility. We head back to HQ, I said. We have work to do. That wasn't an answer. Kendrick knew it wasn't an answer. He fell into step beside me without pushing it further, which was one of the things that made him the right person to have at my side. The thing was, the prisoner wasn't entirely wrong. We had been reactive. We had been following a trail. Every case, from the Billy Rath warehouse in 1979, to the tablet in the underground chamber to the map in the Bushwick warehouse, there was a sequence to it, a direction. The question was whether we were following it or whether we were beginning to understand it well enough to get ahead of it. The Omnius Key, the sleeping witness, the remnants that needed to become one. We were reading a letter from the dead, and the dead, it turned out, had a lot to tell us. I got in the vehicle, back to HQ to finish up for the day. The next day, I had a coffee date to get to. End case file 013 014.