Jocasta is locked and loaded and ready to (carefully) go.
"I honestly don't know what came over me," says Dolores Perry, age 30, of Hayward, "because ordinarily I'd never give strangers a ride somewhere, but they made it seem like it was very important." She sort of shakes her head, trying to get the cobwebs out.
"I must have gotten shaken up by the tire blowout and the sudden stop, because I can't even remember what they look like anymore. All men, though, that I do remember. Maybe ... a bit foreign? Their voices seemed ... foreign. I don't know."
During this conversation, Jo's walkie goes off and Padden reports in.
"All garage street exits are covered by lone agents; we couldn't leave the hotel completely unguarded. No sign of anyone on foot escaping or acting suspicious yet matching your description. A couple of agents have stopped individuals trying to leave the garage not matching your description, though. Do you want to interview them?"
Jocasta asks Padden and Hall to hold for a moment. She'll then inform Ms. Perry that she'll have to remain in the hotel for a few hours due to an ongoing criminal investigation.
"The staff will take good care of you, and give you the use of a phone if you need to call anyone and let them know where you are. We'll try our best to get you home as soon as possible." She'll then pull Roger and Mitch aside and ask what they think before getting back to the FBI.
"I don't want to put the agents in any danger, if the people they've intercepted are our targets, but I'm not sure they are -- they probably wouldn't have let themselves get pulled aside by a single untrained human. But who knows what's happening in a snake's brain? If they're just regular people, we don't need to hold them, and if they're irruptors, we don't have the capacity to neutralize them. I'm inclined to just focus on the hotel, but it's a big gamble. What do you think?"
“I think we stick to the hotel. Let’s call Livermore and let them put out an APB with more SANDMAN agents who can deal with this, save the Bureau.”
Jocasta will thus call.
(So, to clarify, she'll hit up Padden and Hall and just ask them to eyeball these targets and get a read on where they are, then call Livermore, fill them in on a possible irruptor outbreak, and ask for backup to trace/interdict them since we're stretched really thin. Not sure if we need to roleplay this or not other than to enjoy Marshall having further stress headaches.)
(Depending on whether Jo catches Marshall before his call to Granite Peak, he could ask for more backup in the city. But if Jo calls while he’s on the phone he may need to punt to Archie.)
(I guess this is metagaming but it seems most streamlined to make one call to Granite Peak asking for black ops kill teams than to have to make two separate calls? Also, I know nobody is asking Archie, but he would endorse Jo's plan of focusing on the hotel. To him at least, the reality temblor is the real threat - escaping monsters are a lamentable side effect, but sealing the breach is job one.)
Roger will hang around while Jo finishes up with her walkee-talk with Padden and Hall. He doesn't feel right leaving Jo and Mitch to hunt down two more irruptors in the hotel, esp with Jo still injured. He also knows an hour probably isn't enough to find them and take care of it, and he has to run the game. It's an ugly choice, so he's hanging with Jo until the choice absolutely needs to be made to leave.
(I think the timeline is such that Mitch has already gone upstairs by the time Jo returns from talking to her FBI stooges.)