Checkpoints, side alleys, little rooms hidden away in the forgotten corners of a bustling metropolis… Wisp skulked through the backways of the sprawling city, feeling exposed. The rain had let up for the most part, after days of torrential downpour, and now the blackened Dust fell alone as snow across streets and apartment blocks. It did dissolve quite quickly, enough so that it didn’t build up on the ground, but the act of walking outside uncovered still brought with it the strange feeling of scalding the skin that Dust caused upon contact with anything living. Even the rare sentient robot was affected.
“Where’s Mei and Vola?” he asked.
Acid cracked her knuckles as she followed close behind, flanked by Rico and Unze. “For the tenth time, they’re probably doing fine.”
Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of something going wrong. The sense of impending doom building in his gut grew ever-so-slightly worse by the hour. Of course, that might’ve been just the fault of the ongoing Dustfall, but he was the type of the guy to trust his instincts. Especially when they pounded in his ears like war drums. No, wait, that was just his heartbeat; eh, same thing.
The two melee terrors of the hotel were naturally assigned to shred the unfortunate robots unlucky enough to be on patrol at this time of day. A squad had been promised to back them up to ensure their safety and to pull them out of a sticky situation, but Wisp wasn’t exactly the sort with whom trust came easy. On the other hand, he and his three friends were to go alone without support to scope out the main HQ. It was the kind of mission that he knew would result in some kind of trouble, one way or another.
Unze would be able to handle anyone non-robotic, while Rico and Wisp could stall long enough for Acid to carry the femboy to safety should the need arise. It was no star-studded team, but desperate times called for unconventional measures. At the very least, the four of them were issued their own weapons, unwieldy as they might be. Acid had two revolvers at the hip, designed to puncture armor. Wisp sported a modded beam rifle equipped with better heatsinks, capable of outputting enough heat to slag steel. Rico instead got a nice pair of studded gauntlets to wear over his forearms, multiplying the force of his punches with the weight of a steel fist.
The gear did not assuage their collective nervousness, however. Wisp climbed up the rungs of a fire-exit to ascend to a building roof while everyone else stayed on the ground, miniature telescoping device in hand to get a better look. The headquarters of Automotive Industries looked the same as always, a mass of metal and pipeworks that resembled something you might see in a political cartoon, not right in front of you churning out products for the post-modern age. It stretched rather high, akin to a skyscraper though not quite as tall.
Through the gadget in his hands he could see several signatures flying through the air---likely aerial surveillance drones---approaching his location. Now was a good time to activate the second widget he’d been given. He dropped down the fire-exit with a strange spoked wheel in his hand, barely bigger than a palm. It glowed a faint green, warm to the touch.
“Like we practiced, guys. One finger only!” said Wisp.
The four of them hooked a finger around the hoop, and in a blink they were entirely invisible. Not even heat emissions would show up on cameras. The normally oppressive drones passed harmlessly overhead, confused and unable to confirm the target they thought they’d caught. The group held their breath for the slow, plodding seconds as the eyes in the sky disappeared into the fog, the din of their quadcopters falling to uncomfortable silence. Then the sound was gone and they could breathe easy again.
Unze looked up towards where the aerial robots had been a minute before. “That was kind of close!”
“That’s the whole mission, basically,” said Rico, “a series of close calls. How are we supposed to get any data on the headquarters if we have to get close? No way we don’t get caught with our pants down.”
Acid peeked around the corner, hoping the path ahead was clear. “Unze. Anyone loud out there?”
He closed his eyes, letting his mind flatten like a pancake, spreading out like gentle waves lapping at shore. Horizontal distance was the goal, so he leaned into the wall and melted into the world around him (metaphorically). The buzz of people thinking, breathing, going about their days in lockdown, same as every year. The hum built in his mind, the collective murmurs of thousands filling every corner of his brain.
“All good and all clear out here,” says Unze, zeroing in on the building in the distance. Without all the distractions, the hushed whispers and worried warnings passed from coworker to manager to boss simmer in the quiet steel castle at the edge of his vision.
They’re on high alert, that’s obvious enough for him to see. But why? An inside plant? Did someone leak the plans early?
“I think they’re onto us. Not very yippee,” he says.
“What?! We haven’t even gotten close,” Wisp replies.
Acid gestured to move up. “We can still scout?”
“Probably!” said Unze.
That’s the go ahead for her. “I’ll go in as planned, then. Pass anything you think matters back to base and we can get out of here.”
They all spread out, blips on a screen, trackers keeping tabs on everyone’s vitals. Base team was hard at work doing the boring job-- busybodies, bees in a hive, scurrying from panel to panel to make sure nothing was about to go wrong. Nerds sporting glasses, pocket protectors, chewing through all the data being sent their way. Dave heroically agreed to let his workshop be the team’s command hub, and all the strewn electronics were long since swept up and organized, the action floor cleared so Snake could zip from chair to chair, watching everyone’s progress. She was already the de-facto leader for the hotel, and the team of assistants Architectural Constructions sent their way seemed to recognize that intuitively, even if they weren’t all the biggest fans of it.
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Dime rolled into the room on his wheelchair. The dimly lit room clashed with the offensive blue lighting emanating from every monitor, the commotion of managing so many things at once spilling out of everyone’s thoughts into their body language. The sounds, the sights, all so much… He felt nauseous. Still, he pushed into the command room. Even if he couldn’t participate right now, he would soon when he recovered.
“Snake.”
She turned away from the main screen, biting her thumbnail. Seeing Dime did much to make her feel a little better and she put her hand down, an impassive focus coloring her features.
“Oh, hey. Feeling better? Think you’ll be back to normal?”
He smiled, pearly white canines normally so threatening appearing blithely mundane. “Yeah. I’m just tired so I don’t walk much.”
“Energizer potion?”
“Haha, no thanks,” he shuddered. “They taste kind of bitter.”
“Sorry. I’d add sugar if it didn’t throw the reagents off balance. Alchemy is a very exacting science.”
“I can’t complain about it since it saved my life.”
She waved a hand. “Tomatoes, potatoes, whatever. Don’t mention it. Just stay home until you’re all better.”
“I’d love to, but… everyone else is out there. I don’t feel right staying inside.”
“Well that’s because of what happened. I don’t know what’s going on, but… none of us want to see you hurt any more than you already have.”
“I can’t just let everyone else be hurt instead,” said Dime.
Snake bent down to put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not letting us be hurt. We’re choosing to go out there ourselves. We’re settling our debt with the big AI. They’re the ones to bla[…]”
Her voice suddenly began to grow distant. The sounds around him, the voices, they all grew muffled like a big pair of earmuffs had latched itself onto his head. He blinked only to find a blurry lens overtaking his vision, his view of Snake becoming little more than a shapeless blob vaguely resembling the person he knew. He tried to squint, head pounding, fatigue mounting, as words came unbidden to the forefront of his mind:
“You get what I’m saying, right?
He blinked again. Wisp knelt there, in front him, hand on his shoulder, squeezing, a reassuring smile on his face. Wisp was talking to him.
“Wisp?” said Dime.
“Everyone else, they’re out there fighting for you. And Kyki, you know what’s happened to them.”
The little demon let his head hang, unable to meet his gaze. “I know. I didn’t want any of this.”
“And that’s fine, Dime, really. We don’t hate you for it. Accepting your faults is step one, but doing something about it is step two.”
Dime felt tired, only the voice of the guy in front of him keeping him awake, the foreign sensation of someone squeezing his shoulder.
“What do you mean?”
Wisp rolled the wheelchair a little closer. “You’re feeling better, aren’t you? Join us. Help us get Kyki back.”
“Oh… I don’t know if I can…”
Wisp spoke like a heavy weight rested on his chest. “You wouldn’t want anyone else to be hurt, right?”
His sleepy eyes widened a little at the thought of more of his friends potentially befalling the same fate as him; only this time, there wouldn’t be anyone on hand to save them.
“No! No. Of course not.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Despite the onset of dizziness, Dime still sat up, back ramrod-straight, looking into his eyes. “I’m gonna go out there too. I’ll-- I’ll fix this. I’ll take responsibility.”
Snake stopped gently shaking the wheelchair as his declaration of intent. She’d been worried to see him hunched over, eyes unfocused, but all of a sudden the light had returned to his eyes and he was again as bright as ever.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Dime blinked again. “Hm? Yes. I’m sure. I’ve got to make it up to everyone. I promised.”
Snake searched his eyes for the doubt she thought she saw in his gaze, but right now it seemed like all that had disappeared, replaced with the cheery determination to do what was right.
To take responsibility.
The clatter of a keyboard hitting the ground tore her attention away, towards a ruckus at the far end of the room. Two of the assistants were arguing and had bumped it off the table, too heated to care.
The first, a man named Leo, jabbed a finger at the monitor. “We have to up the pace of the operation! If they’re catching on faster than we thought it’s just a matter of time before the window of opportunity slams shut!”
The second, a woman named Aubrey, spread her arms in indignation. “We push this shit forward and there’s no way we’re not getting fucked! The casualties, the loss of life-- it’d be catastrophic! Can’t you see that?”
“Okay, everyone calm down for a second,” said Snake, stepping between them. “I get your point, Leo, but Aubrey has a point.”
“It’s a hard decision! Someone has to make the choice. It’s now or never. We wait for the right time and it’s just not gonna happen!”
“You think I don’t know that? I don’t need you explaining to me the obvious, man.”
She sat down in an unoccupied chair with a sigh. A few keystrokes later and the visual of all their current teams was displayed in the air via hologram, a 3D rendering of the situation on the ground. Hotel Team A currently extracting from the site, Hotel Team B finishing up their scouting op, and several more backup squads tailing patrols… it was all a carefully coordinated setup in preparation for the real game, happening soon.
“It’s clear we need more time,” Snake continued, “If you would just examine the situation for a second. We don’t know nearly enough to rush in without a guarantee we don’t get our asses kicked, and any suspicion on what’s up could get the rescue target relocated to an external location. That would be incredibly bad for us. Maybe if you argued with your words instead of yelling at Aubrey hoping to cow her into agreeing, I wouldn’t be having to have this conversation with you. I’m disappointed in you, you know. As an adult, you should already understand that you need to be more mature if you want to work with others, and if you’re not going to express that kind of desirable behavior no one will want to work with you. Criticism of your point isn’t a personal attack on you so it shouldn’t justify that kind of overblown response, especially since you’re older than she is. Even if it was a personal attack you could just come to me and I’d help you sort it out. By starting this argument you’ve already hurt the cohesion of the team as a whole by putting everyone on edge, and that’s not the kind of thing I tolerate when building a team. We all have our part to play and you’re--”
“I GET IT, GOD!” cried Leo. “Then just do whatever! I don’t care.”
He stormed away for the door as everyone watched on. Snake just rolled her eyes and went back to work. He slammed the door with a mutter just loud enough for everyone to hear.
“No wonder why the board ousted you…”
A moment of silence. Then everyone returned to the usual, typing away and logging anything interesting. Amidst the activity, Dime rolled up next to Snake, eyes on the monitors. He didn’t say anything or ask any questions, though, just watching the alchemist pore over notes, numbers, things of interest. It was like nothing had happened at all. Still, despite the overstimulation of everything happening all at once that he couldn’t grow accustomed to, Dime stayed in the command hub for a while. It just didn’t feel right leaving Snake alone in there.