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Author Topic: First Comes Entering, Followed by Breaking  (Read 531 times)

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Offline Lion

First Comes Entering, Followed by Breaking
« on: September 15, 2017, 02:36:42 am »
[Nephero!]

Two puzzle cubes in hand, one opened, and the other one secured in the backpack he had around his shoulders. Nero was used to traveling light, and the little blue cube he was playing with in hand made small glowy sparks as he turned the cornered cubes around it's spherical base and was busy matching the shapes on the side, turning it over and over in hand.  Sure it wasn't a Zoomix cube, but this wasn't that cheap manufactured plastic that made those things break in seconds flat of solving it.

This was a light aluminum, and the ball joints were greased enough in all it's moving parts. He palmed the cube in hand and peeked up to the side of the warehouse where a small partition in the fencing was basically a welcome mat spread out for him. "Well, thank you kindly. Don't mind if I do," he mumbled along and tucked the cube into the puzzle of his jacket.

He didn't know which pharmaceutical distributors warehouse this was, or even if it was the right one. But it seemed the closet one in this sector and was within considerable distance to that Butcher Boutique place. Bring him puzzle cubes he said. Make it a purple one, he said. So why the hell not?

It wasn't like Nero had anything else to do tonight. That and well, there were probably a few good pills to pop, take, and sell if he could nab a few. A cube for some pills, seemed like a fair trade to him. And if he didn't want to trade, well, it wasn't like he had to know anyway. And if it turned out this was the wrong building and there was no one here in need of puzzle cubes, he'd still come out with a backpack full of pharmaceuticals he could make a nice clean killing off of.

Nero'nieske tilted his head up to the window sill above him, and the lamp post that hung over it. This side of the building was remarkably quiet and while Nero didn't exactly give a shit if anyone was watching him, he kept an eye out for any eyes in the sky. Hm, well, the turnstile eyes that made a point of recording every movie in places like this.

A quick throwing of the hoodie over his head, and zipping up the jacket he wore over it, a simple green jumper with a red and white insignia over his right shoulder. The hood wouldn't help much, but it was comfortable, soft, like the belly of the hobo he took it off of. It would certainly look better on him to boot too.

His hand unfurled the whip he held on his belt, and he flicked his wrist upward, sending the tendril up to wrap around that overhanging post and he pulled himself up, wrapping the end around his wrist until he got his boots on the sill. Worn brown leather, wouldn't be slipping off any time soon. His hand twitched and he licked his lips. Over hanging lights made this particularly hallway dim, only lit once every other  light, and the small window he climbed into was little more than a crawl space compared to this hallway and Nero glanced up to the camera that moved to and fro in the top lefthand corner.

"Easy peasy, booby-squeezy," he murmured softly, untangling the whip and wrapping it up, securing it back onto his belt.  Nero slipped down quietly, landing in a crouch before he felt the puzzle cube in his pocket. "Cubes, cubes, and more cubes! What did Willie win on The Price Tag Game? Cubes! That's right Linda, he won a lifetime supply of Cantankerous Karen's Cosmic Cubical Cornflakes. All the protein a growing boy needs, and then some. An important part of a nutritious breakfast!"

Nero was mumbling all that nonsense, and it came as little more than a whisper as he slunk along the wall down the opposite away from the camera's current viewing angle, head down. Down here, he could see the pallet shelves as the hallway opened up into a double-door entrance. He paused briefly, keeping his vision forward, on the goal. Somewhere in those stacks there were pills with his name on them.

Ah, well, not really. Maybe one of them had Willie's name on it. Or Karen. But hell, even he had to admit that was silly. These were the drugs as they were before they were stamped with a designated name for a designated condition, and decisively designated to make a dedicated profit.

Something twisted in Nero's guts at that thought. It was a brilliant scheme. Convince folks that they were sick, hell maybe even contribute to the things that were making them sick, then sell them a solution to the sickness for a tidy sum you could tuck away on your chips. Fat stacks for a fat cat as they watched the mice at play.  He wasn't sure if he was sick because people would swallow just about anything, or that he didn't think of it first.

Now, though, it was his turn to stick his fingers in the pie. It wasn't like this company, whatever it was, would even miss a small stash of drugs should it go missing. Who would even care? And if he was caught, he was just a guy looking for the bathroom.

Whoops, and took a turn into an open window.

Flawless plan.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2017, 03:15:58 am by Lion »

Offline nephero

Re: First Comes Entering, Followed by Breaking
« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2017, 06:08:33 pm »
If Vertraum had ever known his mother, she might have warned him against talking to strangers. But, as it turned out, he didn't know her, and the people who had taken over the task of raising him had never saw the point in teaching things like stranger-danger. They were too busy instilling other things in him.

In retrospect, the things they taught him ended up being useful enough in their own way. Ten easy methods for deboning sentient vertebrates in only twenty minutes! It definitely made for better eating than whatever bargain bin beef he could scrape up on his salary. Which wasn't bad, but it sure as shit didn't cover tenderloin steak every meal of the day. And after three days of fish, Van just started getting sick. Not enough of the red stuff.

But about a hundred eighty pounds? Plenty of the red stuff. A whole month's worth, if he rationed it properly.

All he had to do was keep an eye out, business as usual. Iveson & Iveson Healthcare Incorporated certainly didn't give two shits: it saved them the trouble of having repeat offenders, and also the plethora of paperwork that went with filing security reports, upgrading surveillance cameras, and so on. If Vertraum made all those little problems disappear, what did they care that a bunch of junkies went missing? Good riddance, was the general consensus.

It did, however, earn the place a bit of a reputation, and after a while the junkies learned to get their fix elsewhere. Which left Van hungry AND bored, a rather dangerous combination for someone who didn't tolerate either very well. Van sighed, poking around his lunch box without much appetite, the tuna steak none too satisfying tonight. It hadn't been satisfying the past two nights, but hey, who was counting? Certainly not him, or any of his multitude of friends, who no one was counting either, hah!

Breaking from his now several-hour TV marathon of empty corridor 1, its spin-off empty corridor 2, and the rather underrated empty corridors 3, 4 and 5 (5 being the weakest when it came to storylines, but it had a solid cast), Vertraum took half a moment to check his phone, only to come back just as disappointed as he'd been with his lunch.

He'd only taken to chat clients to stave off boredom (not loneliness, because feh!, who needed people that badly?), but it didn't seem like anyone was up at this hour of the night to assist in that respect. Well, StarRanger had been on and talking about bringing puzzles, but an hour of silence later meant that Van was, as usual, on his own.

Which was kind of a shame. He'd met Star once (“met”, insofar as he still used the guy's username as his name), and Van really didn't mind the guy. He was weird, weird as hell, but who was he to judge? At least he kept things interesting. And that was half the battle.

Prepared for what looked to be a long, long night, Van had just settled back in his chair in the camera room when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. It was quick, and fleeting, but Van knew every inch of this building well enough to know that had been no fluke. Tossing his lunch box to the side, he leaned forward, tapped at the controls to roll back the tape on one screen while turning another camera to pick up where the movement might have carried on to. Yup. There it was again-- the telltale flicker of a hood in a corner no hood had any business being. Van swallowed hard as he began to salivate. Just in time.

Watch it be one of the newbie janitors thinking they could “borrow” paper supplies from work. They would sure need those shit tickets once Van caught up with them, but Van hoped that wasn't the case. He was getting mighty hungry, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to just let the idiot go if it was an employee.

Night-stick holstered and flashlight left behind, Van couldn't help a wide, sharptoothed grin as he played with the master control for the building lights. Click, click, click.

He had no trouble with the dark, after all. But burglars tended to need such things, and it made for far easier hunting if they no longer knew which way was out.

And with that, Van left the security office, stomach rumbling and nerves tingling in anticipation.

Offline Lion

Re: First Comes Entering, Followed by Breaking
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2017, 03:15:15 am »
At the time, it didn't really occur to Nero that this might not even be the right building that Loop-de-loops even worked in. Or lived in. The constant array of folks that provided services directly from their homes was such an normative, to consider that Loop-de-loops lived at all elsewhere was utter preposterous. He'd met many a brilliant scientist that had their labs in the kitchen, their offices in dining areas, their bedrooms for client meetings, and all in a days work, they cooked, booked, and sold their wares to the needy and greedy public.

Not to mention the commute was so much better. But heaven forbid, you ask if they have any public restrooms. That'd boot your ass out faster than a cepholopod caught in a ship's latrine airlock.

Nero shuddered and pushed on through those double doors. They were little more than rubber-edged partitions, loosely warding off any would-be burglars that wanted to their their slimy paws on some top of the line, fresh off the pill-machine, high-end melt your brains and numb the pain pharmaceuticals! Oh good thing there were none of them in here. No, sirree, none whatsoever.

Nope, just a regular guy looking for the bathroom. Nothing at all suspicious about his hood and his backpack or the slinking against the wall, once he was through those doors and booking it toward the pallet shelves. Metal cache boxes that were stacked in rows of three, two high at a time.

He had no idea what was in there. But that was rather moot by this point. It didn't matter, someone would buy it and figure it out. Nero crouched in front of one of the boxes and carefully examined it. "Frost boxes for the ice cream man," Nero mumbled softly, again whispering to himself. Frost box, or a fridge receptacles  to keep drugs that needed to be cold - well cold. Regulated temperatures, kept it quality. Higher grades tended to fetch higher prices.

Breaking into one wasn't exactly difficult. He had a tool to plug into the auxiliary port to bypass the necessary keycode, but he wasn't sure he wanted to be carrying around a few samples of something that could deteriorate in a few hours. He'd need to take a decent stash and it'd hold him well for some time.  Something dry.

Preferably in the hard and chalky family too.

"Next time, Iceman. What --!"  Whispers that no one heard. Ha! Well, someone did. Or someone saw him. The lights immediately went off and in that thick inky blackness, Nero hackles rose on the back of his neck. Suffocating dark. Power outage? Unlikely. These places were built with back up generators for the back up generators - power cells that could last a hundred lifetimes or more! Nope, these lights were manually disabled.

He figured it was only a matter of time before someone saw him traipsing about. Security sure seemed pretty light, but not that light. Nero crouched and glanced up at the rest of the pallet shelves. He tensed his muscles and pushed up from the ground, scaling three levels approximately six feet each and clung to the edge of the shelf. All the lower levels held those heavy metal fridges, and slimmer, lighter containers were filed neatly on the upper shelves. No keycodes, no trouble.

Nero held his breath in that darkness, thinking back to the caves on Edanith, digging out a long-forgotten stash, or yanking out cargo that tried to run. He always hated that; it just made his work all that much harder. While he was no stranger to that darkness, he reckoned the one that shut those lights off probably wasn't either.

A noise nearby and Nero released that low quiet breath, ducking onto his belly and hiding between two sets of crates, shuffling along on his belly as he moved to a small crack between the containers, waiting, and letting his eyes adjust, waiting for anything to move through those double-doors, which thus far remained still as if in a dead wind.

No light, and Nero sniffed the air. Something was coming. Something with a pulse. And smelled heavily of steak. His eyes dilated and breath hitched. "Loop-de-loops?"  And his hand shot over his mouth as if to keep other words from stumbling out.

 

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