Saints without sparks (Ch. 2: Day 7, pt. II)

psikeout · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:17 pm

There was something vaguely machine-like about the way he consumed the papers he was handed. One page was held dead still for about three seconds as his eyes roved across it a couple times, then it was flipped, and the process repeated. By the time she got to the end of her explanation, he had gone through most of the material.

"I don't really know everything they left out," he conceded, his syllables stretching in the thoughtfulness of an extended exhalation, "but I do know they omitted how the emerald got to Yellow Desert in the first place." He continued to thumb through papers, a little more casually now. "Big detail to glaze over, too. Eggman basically made a 'portal to anywhere,' to put it simple. It was a teleporter he could point to just about anywhere in the universe, at least if we believe his bragging."

He continued to explain.

"A bunch of us were in a mile-wide crystal geode under that crater—you know, the new Mist Island thing—and the place fell apart when we were fighting. He got away through the portal. Some hedgehog kid named Sheffer Hawkins picked up the emerald he dropped, while I got the portal control away from him. Some'a Sonic's buddies were there too; Tails figured out how to work the controller, and got us a window open over Yellow Desert."

He handed the stack of papers back.

"Aaand, the rest is whatchucall history. That little girl they got for a sheriff tried to arrest us, the hedgehog boy went with'er, Eggman showed up th'next day, and the emerald blew up in the fight."

When it was all said and done, Rock was staring very intently in nearly-invasive, very direct eye contact. Jam probably wouldn't like it, but, it certainly wasn't one of his more charming flirting faces. It was more an intensely scrutinizing stare. It was furthermore accompanied by a cryptic footnote: "There's a reason I'm actually bothering to tell you all this, though."

Mie · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:44 pm

Ever out of the loop, when curtain number one revealed a fat stack of bills, it elicited a confused blink from the thus far quietest inhabitant in the room, but little else. She shifted her weight to the alternate foot, and respectfully resumed her role taking up space. ... Until their guest brought up Yellow Desert. Immediately that distrustful stare which had previously favored Rogue's new additions to their room swiveled onto her amid a wave of rapidly ascending red flags. It was at this point that Jam had opened her mouth, but was cut off by Rock's unexpected spilling of the legumes, and probably for the better.

Though his explanation yielded no unknown details about their encounter with Eggman, or the resulting decimation of an entire city, it was the last sentence that changed her surly expression to one of plain befuddlement, replete with sky-high brows and fluttering eyelids.

Rouge · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:52 pm

Rouge met Rock's gaze, blithely—a nondescript smile hanging distantly around her lips.

Standing in front of the bed, her body settled into a crooked pose made up of contrasting angles of the hip and shoulder. The finger of one hand was pressed lightly against her lips in—for all intents and purposes—thoughtfulness as she listened, with her elbow cupped lightly in the hand of the opposite arm. Rouge eyes remained politely empty—half-hooded and expressionless—as she met Rock’s gaze.

As his stare continued, she arched, by maybe an eighth of an inch, one eyebrow, in what appeared to be somewhat self-aware amusement at the situation. Yes, as he went on, the haze surrounding Rouge’s expression lifted, broken by a sliver of sharp interest. Her hand moved down to her chin, and she tilted her head in quiet attention.

“Hmm,” she said, almost to herself, “Isn’t that interesting.”

“…Well,” she offered, after a few seconds, “why are you telling all this to me, then, of all people?”

psikeout · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 12:14 am

"Because you're a very specific 'people,'" Rock answered.

He stood there a moment more, as if considering his words, then slowly turned, and wandered aimlessly toward the curtained, sliding glass door, his black-gloved hands folded behind his back.

"You work for GUN, but you're not owned by'em," he said flatly. "I had an opportunity to read one 'Agent Rouge's' report earlier this year—the one where you outed GUN on the whole ARK incident directly to the president."

He slid the curtain open and peered outside. There was barely any direct daylight still creeping in over the horizon, but enough to put a glare on the glass. Rock's face reflected transparently as he watched the beginnings of a typical casino night below.

"That tells me you're the kind of person who makes sure missing details get to the right place. And I have a feeling that, with... portal technology,... violent separatists GUN doesn't even like to comment on publicly,... and emeralds that go off like A-bombs, there's a lotta those details floatin' around."

Rouge · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 1:00 am

Behind Rock's back, Rouge smiled. It was an abrupt smile, which crossed her face with very little of the slow intent that accompanied most of her actions hither-to, and was, perhaps, edged with the tiniest bit of surprise.

Aloud, she said:

"It's lucky for you that I didn't have anything to do, then."

She stretched her back, and stepped lightly, idly back to the briefcase.

"I'm so busy, all the time, it's a shock I was free when I was," she went on, "I've gotten in and out of so many safes…" she reminisced, speaking aloud with an air of public self-satisfaction, "hidden record rooms… espionage operations…"

"—and speaking of that," she added, "here."

As she talked, she had idly fiddled with a part of the briefcase's compartment fitting. There was a zip of a strap being undone, and then Rouge removed, from the briefcase, a slender beige box which had been outfitted with a string of led lights, some switches, and a series of small knobs. A stubby antennae protruded from the back of it.

As she held the device up with one hand, her other hand reached into the briefcase and removed another item, a small, webbed nylon bag, within which could be seen more of the little plastic discs which graced the room.

psikeout · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 1:23 am

Rock rolled his eyes just a little—not particularly scathingly, but instead in slight amusement. She was one of those people: the "goodguy" (or girl, in this case) nearly embarrassed to be one. When his attention was called back to the goods being delivered, though, he finally turned and swaggered over, thumbs hanging from his belt loops; when she offered the device, he... just looked at it, then her, then it, with a face that begged the question, "This is it? You're not kidding?"

He eventually took it.

"This a family heirloom or somethin'?" he mumbled (partially in jest) as he flipped the little piece of electronics over and all around, and examined its withered beige plastic casing, thoroughly looking down his nose at its unappealing aesthetics.

Rouge · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 6:36 pm

“Aren't you impressed?” Rouge intoned, in a hurt tone of voice. “This is what’s keeping your conversation with me a secret. It’s a bug jammer. That’s the transmitter,” she said.

As she lightly jangled the webbed bag of plastic discs to finish her point, she glanced around the room, turning her gaze meaningfully back to Rock after a few minutes. She smiled archly.

"I don’t think the owner of this hotel trusts you very much.” One hand on her hip, she reached across with her other hand, and pressed a switch on the back of the box. After a second or two, the bar of red LEDs on the front of the box lit up, and the box itself began to emit a low warning tone.

“This whole room is bugged,” Rouge elaborated, “every single inch of it. If you’ve had any conversations in here about any of this, he’s probably heard them already.”

“Turn this on,” she tapped her finger on a second switch, which was already flipped to the ON position, before drawing back and standing upright again, “to broadcast noise to the speakers. Whoever’s listening won’t be able to hear anything but static—they’ll think there’s trouble with the signal.”

She took a few steps towards the middle of the room, and looked around.

“Although,” she said, “whoever’s doing the listening might come up to see what’s wrong, sooo… I’d hide that when you’re not using it.”

“The last thing in that briefcase is the Emerald Radar—it’s modified to avoid any interference from your little piece of jewelry,” she nodded at Jam.

The Emerald Radar was the last thing in the briefcase, nestled deep within a buttress of foam squares. It was, indeed, ugly. At some point it had been a compact and serviceable device, but its EMP-safe retro-fitting had turned it into a bulky, black thing, largely held together with glue and electrical tape, and packaged in black carbon-fibre and wire-mesh. Its screen and controls had been mounted outside the box and held on with more of the curious glue, and tiny breakers had been jammed into all the circuits between the inside and the outside.

“It’s tacky, and ugly, but that’s better than accidentally ruining the whole during a little spat with—oh, I don't know—whoever you might run into.”

psikeout · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2010 10:09 pm

Rock examined the ugly box, but with more appreciation than the last homely contraption. The EMP-protection was a boon; with Jam around, Rock could seldom keep nice things.

"Good," he murmured inattentively, booting up and fiddling with the device. Almost immediately, it started beeping, but in a few seconds, he got through the menus necessary to exclude certain frequency ranges. (If Rouge was particularly attentive, she'd find that he had some very specific numerical values that he immediately punched in for exclusion.)

He looked up from his fiddling as one last, vital detail popped into his head.

"How are we gonna stay in contact?" asked the monkey. "Bat signal?"

Rouge · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 7:01 pm

Rouge gave him an appraising sort of look, as if trying to decide whether or not to respond to that line, before tossing her head.

“I think something a little more direct might work, don’t you?“

She stepped lightly across to the dresser and swept up the complementary ballpoint pen that the hotel had provided, flicking it lightly over the back of her fingers so it arrived the right way around in her grasp. She took a business card of some sort from the cuff of one of her long and extravagantly well-taken care of evening gloves, and scribbled something on the back.

As she wrote, clutching the pen delicately through the sheer fabric of her glove, it was obvious that the glove had either either never been used in any rough activity, or that it had been so well maintained that it would not matter if it had. It was probably the most un-thieflike part of her wardrobe, apart from the high-heels, which could not have made midnight excursions on roof-tops much easier than trying to river-dance on a pair of stilts might be. Nevertheless, there they were.

Rouge finished writing, read the card, and then underlined something. Satisfied with what she wrote, she smiled a tight-lipped little smile, and flipped the card over in her hand.

A few steps later and she was back in front of rock.

“Here’s my personal number,” she said, and offered him the card. As she handed it over, she directed at Jam, a look, without ever changing her expression.

“Anyway,” she she said, walking over to the hotel room’s balcony. “I’ll see myself out.”

With a light hop, she cleared the balcony railing and was sitting on top of it.

“Bye-bye!”

She fluttered her fingers in a playful, if not slightly patronizing, farewell before, with very little effort, she tipped backwards off the balcony and was lost to view. Any immediate investigation through the window would reveal—already at some distance—a black, white, and pink-all-over shape swooping away, low through the buildings of Casino Park.

Written on the back of the card she had left was the number:

708 555-0139

And, written below:

Call me any time,
Men like you make me go bananas! ♡

psikeout · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 7:31 pm

The white primate examined the card briefly; the bat took just enough time leaving to be around to see him flip it over and read the message.

His face did not change at all, but his pupils shrank to beady. The way he then looked up at her through the tops of his eyes without moving his head and without offering parting words, with the musculature of his face just the tiniest bit tightened back in irritation, was telling enough.

As soon as they were rid of her presence, the monkey grinned a grin most bitter, simian fangs gleaming in the corners of his mouth, as he raised the card with unnatural, robotic fluidity, creased it in a flat fold, slid it into his back pocket, and exhaled in a quiet puff.

Rock knew when he'd been burned.

Mie · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 7:38 pm

Whatever interest or curiosity she'd previously held for the interaction instantaneously soared out the window ahead of their sultry informant as if on cue at that look.

Jam bristled defensively, and though she couldn't quite be certain why, she drew up her shoulders, rose to her full height, and pointedly eyed Rouge all the way off the balcony, which she was pretty certain she'd have like the bat to have simply walked off.

Without paying much attention to Rock's own response to their new ally, yet being able to derive it from the mutual climate of the room all the same, the pinker primate, arms crossed tightly over chest, and furrow-browed, with her jaw protruding, merely snorted loudly out her nose.

"I don't like it; can we send it back?"

psikeout · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 11:07 pm

His perturbation short-lived, Rock waved a hand to gesticulate away the thoughts of the encounter as he turned back to Jam. "Let's just give this thing a shot," he suggested, raising the radar with his other hand. "Wanna go on a lil' run with me?"

Mie · Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 11:56 pm

Too busy burning holes through the spot where Rouge had been mere moments prior, the "this" Rock wanted to give a shot was mis-contextualized, and confusion once more replaced ire until Jam turned back towards him.

"Oh, yeah, sure," she replied with a blink. "On both accounts. ...Just makin' sure, but I was talkin' about sendin' her back. I don' mind keepin' that piece a'crap."

psikeout · Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 1:38 am

***

There's no such thing as night in a place like Casino Park. The sun goes down, but it never goes out; it just shines from under the ground, and blasts its rays of light and sound out the windows and signs of the city.

To Rock, looking down from some restricted ledge of Vince's resort plateau far beyond the safety of rails and velvet rope, it very nearly looked like the town was on fire, or somehow exploding. Everything was animated, and larger than life. Towers reached to the sky, signs looked like slot machines that were large enough to dispense people instead of coins, and the headlights on the streets were so small and ant-like that they were hard to single out.

The crouching primate lingered with his palm on the ledge, fingers curled over the edge. Even with the chill of night and altitude, he forwent a shirt or coat and wore only his shorts, boots, gloves, and a small, grey, single-strapped duffel bag diagonally across his back. He intended to get exercise enough to stay warm.

The white simian shot a glance to the red one beside him. "Lemme know if I go too fast," he advised, just a little knowingly haughty and smirky about it. Then he jumped.

A deadly-looking plummet soon appeared completely controlled. Falling was something he was experienced in; with arms and legs out, but bent just so, he controlled his rate of descent and attitude with no problem as he whizzed past the lights and infrastructure adorning the outside of the immense Hot Constellations platform wall.

The surface wasn't perfectly vertical, but instead slightly angled. It occasionally came under his feet, but without sufficiently fast stride to actually run down it, he was left tagging it violently with his boots at high speed. As he got farther down, though, he aerially backed into it by intention, legs folded under him, and jammed both feet against the protruding edge of one of the tremendous vertical steel beams that ran the height of the structure. Sparks showered from the magnetic metal plates in his arches like there was some invisible welding job going on underneath, but it gave him the control and friction he needed to slow his descent just enough to get some control, look around, and plot his next move.

A couple seconds later, he was soaring in a leap toward some monstrous work of advertising mounted atop a nearby casino below that looked like an oversized pinball machine. He was probably going to break something expensive when he landed, but he didn't hold the well-being of gambling establishments in very high regard, anyway.

Mie · Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 9:02 pm

Though the red figure, who remained behind a dawdling moment after the white's departure, shook her head, and rolled her eyes theatrically, the smirk that curled the corner of her mouth upward was irrefutably boastful.

Without the flair and grace of her predecessor, she thwomped down from their starting point with outright unfeminine violence, replete with pulsating, sparking orb, exacerbating the damage she and gravity had already done on the surely expensive fixture.

Without a trace of acrophobia, Jam rose to her full height, setting her hands on her hips, and dropping her head to a cant as she sent a sideways grin at Rock.

"We wouldn't be trying to impress anyone, now would we?" she teased, calling over the crisp rooftop breeze.

Saints without sparks (Ch. 2: Day 7, pt. II)

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