Lie about your predicament

"Sir, the truth is... I think I'm coming down with something. I'm not sure what it is, I feel pretty nauseous and just generally not myself today." Both statements were true, as lying to McPhearson made you queasy in the even that he called your bluff.

"Damn it..." you heard McPhearson say as he held the phone away from himself, trying to mask his frustration at the mounting problems his Angel 800 units were facing, whether or not they were real. "Fine, maybe it's best that you stay isolated anyway, I don't want you to inadvertently get stuck in the same state as the other units. What about Angel Five, is she still available? Put her on."

With a shrug, you held the phone up to Angel Five's ear, staying quiet on the microphone. "Sir, this is Angel Five. I'm feeling okay, I can come in and do something."

"I don't want you coming in either, at least I don't want you setting foot in the station. We still need to conduct a search for the missing units, so I need you to figure out a way to get out and search for some tracker beacons, got it?"

"Uh, yes sir," Angel Five said, hoping you were up for travel even though any sort of transport with your combined body would be somewhat awkward to coordinate at first. "I can get around just fine, if dispatch can send a map for my search area I'll get right on it."

"Good, glad someone's still able to do something around here... look, Angel Five, I don't have to tell you that this is a significant problem for our department. If we're losing Angels and Riders in addition to them being brought down by corrupted batteries, this project isn't going to last very long. Right now, the safety of Rider Two and Unit Seven are our top priority, we look after our own. Do whatever it take."

"Sir, understood."

You hung up and leaned against the counter as Angel Five sighed loudly. "Well, this is a nightmare," you said, shaking your head as you hurried to the bedroom to look for some appropriate clothes. "How are we going to find anything like this? We can't keep track of all the data you normally look at if we're going to take one of the other bikes. The Bull's got a good screen but we're going to be slow if we're splitting our attention."

"We'll make do," Angel Five said, guiding you to pick out certain pieces of attire as she fixated on them with her eyes. You'd picked out enough of an outfit to serve as decent riding gear, giving yourself a quick look in the mirror to try and fix your messy hair a bit. "Don't worry about it, the helmet's just going to screw it up anyway. Let's just hurry!"

You hustled out of your apartment and down to the garage where your limited choices awaited. Normally you would take your Hideki Falcon sportbike if you weren't using the Angel platform for your riding, but that definitely wasn't as capable of everything you would need when out on the road. Instead, you reached out to the tarp over the larger Yabusa Bull police cruiser motorcycle, knowing it had enough onboard systems to handle what you needed.

A sound to your side made you stop. "What was that?" you whispered, even though only Angel Five could have heard you through her microphone anyway.

"Don't know," she said as quiet as possible. You turned to look at the wall of tools you'd used to maintain your vehicles, where it seemed something could had fallen off and to the ground, but you didn't see anything of note there. You heard a second noise, this time from the darker corner of the garage where you couldn't spot anything clearly, but where your Angel 800 and Rider armor was stored. Taking a step back, you flicked on the switch to spy what might have made all that noise--maybe a stray cat got into the garage? Or something a bit stranger?