Narrow Escapes

Posted on May 21, 2016 @ 2:42am by Selyara Chen & Raxl Dreyton
Edited on on May 21, 2016 @ 2:44am

Mission: Fortress: Earth

"Narrow escapes"

(Cont. Voices in the Dark)

LOCATION: San Francisco, EARTH

SCENE: Cafe

STARDATE: 2.160520.2227

Lawrence “People Call Me Larry” Declan raised the mug of tea to his lips with shaking hand. The past 24 hours had seen his life blow up, figuratively as well as literally. He had just been about to settle down to a late dinner when the door to his apartment had chimed. Then the Vulcan woman had swept past him, talking casually about how she was the Shadow Master and how she knew all about the stolen comms tech that Larry had been trying to move off world, and Larry had abruptly lost his appetite. He still wasn’t sure if the Vulcan had been telling the truth - as crazy as the last several hours had been, the idea that the Shadow Master, of all people, would come all the way to Earth just to see him still felt wildly implausible - but she’d known enough to cut off Larry’s weak protestations of guilt.

Then his door had exploded, and the Vulcan had seized his hand, and suddenly Larry was leaping out onto his fire escape to pound frantically down the stairs to safety. At the time, the surge of adrenaline coupled with the surreal tableau his evening had provided had made Larry overlook how very out of character that had been for him. Larry was many things, including a coward, but he was not prone to rash and decisive action, not even in self defense. Larry recalled times in his childhood, when the older, bigger boys would gather round him, keeping in step with him as he walked up the sidewalk. They would taunt him, get in his way, occasionally flick his ears or try to hit him. Larry never ran then, or fought back. Even under threat, he would be too paralyzed to act, the kind of man who’d stare wide-eyed at the train bearing down on him.

It was, after all, why he’d let them into his house in the first place. The Vulcan had said “Shadow Master”, and Larry froze. Everything that had happened after (right up to the point where bombs started going off) had been what the Vulcan woman wanted, and Larry had been too dumbstruck to seriously resist. Instead of mounting any kind of defense, or even just threatening to call the authorities himself, Larry had instead sat on his couch and openly discussed his attempted treason, all while his dinner was getting cold in the kitchen.

But then that bit with the fire escape… no, that just wasn’t Larry.

It was the Vulcan, he’d decided in the hours that had passed since it happened. Something in her touch. It had been almost electric; Larry thought he could still feel the sensation of his hand in hers, like a warm, not unpleasant glow over his skin. But while her touch had been soft, its effects were not. As soon as her hand had closed around his, Larry had the brief and terrible sensation of being swept up in raging flood, everything he was suddenly immersed and borne along by an irresistible force. It wasn’t Larry who dove for the window. It wasn’t Larry who fled swiftly down the stairs to the street. It wasn’t Larry who hit the pavement and kept running, leaving his now smoking apartment building behind as he ran, and ran, legs pumping until they could go no more and gave out from underneath him. It wasn’t even Larry who fell, his arms flailing uselessly out, and hit the sidewalk hard enough to drive the wind from him.

It was Larry who’d sat up, though. And it was Larry now, cowering in this cafe, his hands scraped from his tumble the night before. After getting his bearings and making sure he was “himself” again, Larry had returned to his apartment, only to find it swarmed with emergency response teams and those black-shirted enforcers that made up Admiral Edgerton’s “security force”. They were poking through the wreckage, with most of their attention focused on the smoldering remains of Larry’s apartment. Larry didn’t know if the Vulcan and her bodyguard had made it out, or if they’d taken the stolen comm equipment with them even if they did, and he decided that the last thing he was in the mood for now was an interrogation room.

So he’d wandered the city for a while, considering his options, waiting for himself to calm down. But it wasn’t working. Every now and then, his mind would trace along its train of thought to the inevitable conclusion: that Larry Declan was almost certainly going to prison on charges of treason, and he would likely never understand why or how this strange turn had happened to him. Each time he arrived at this conclusion, his knees went weak, and eventually he spotted the cafe and hoped some tea might be enough to soothe his nerves. Then he remembered he’d never gotten around to eating his dinner last night, and ordered a croissant as well.

The croissant still sat on its plate, untouched. Larry brought the mug of steaming tea to his lips, blew on it weakly, and sipped. It burned his lips and tongue on the way down, but the pain was a pleasant distraction from abject hopelessness. He decided to focus on it, and took another sip.

Then a man slid into the seat across from him. No, that wasn’t quite right… it was more like he *poured* himself into it, materializing there with such sudden intensity that for a moment Larry wasn’t sure he hadn’t been there all along. Larry only stared at him, wide-eyed, over the rim of his cup. The man was black, with smooth, sharp features and brown eyes that seemed to fix Larry in place. Here was that train again, bearing down on him, and here was Larry, paralyzed as usual.

Larry remained frozen in place as the man reached beneath the table, and placed a familiar metal chassis on the table between them, next to the plate that still held Larry’s croissant. Larry recognized the object at once: it was the stolen communicator, looking a little worse for wear after its adventure the night before, but every bit as familiar and incriminating as Larry remembered. The man never broke eye contact with Larry during this gesture, and now he folded his hands demurely on the tabletop before him and sat, his intense gazed fixed immutably on Larry.

They might have sat like that for hours, if not for the steam from Larry’s cup wafting up into his eyes and making him blink. He set the cup down, eyes watering a little, and when he looked back up, the man was still there, his eyes still fixed on Larry. For a moment, Larry wondered (maybe even hoped) that the strange man was a only a hallucination, a symptom of his strained mind finally reaching its breaking point.

But that was a hypothesis that demanded testing, and so Larry set about verifying the man’s identity in what seemed like the most logical way.

“Uh…” Larry squeaked. “This table is taken.”

The man didn’t move. He only stared at Larry, his expression unreadable.

“He-h-hello?” Larry asked, feeling an interesting blend of stupid and terrified. “Can you h-hear me?”

The man didn’t move, didn’t say a word.

“This is a-about l-last night,” Larry stammered. “I d-don’t know who those p-p-people were, and I d-don’t know what th-that is either.”

The man’s eyes burned into Larry, blasting all traces of confidence away from his lie. Larry deflated instantly, his eyes sinking to the tabletop to stare helplessly into his tea.

“I j-j-just wanted to p-pr-prove I wasn’t a c-coward,” Larry said. “There were these m-men from the Orion Syndicate. They… they made m-me feel... “

Larry trailed off as he realized that he could no longer remember exactly *what* the Orions had made him feel. Oh they’d plied him with drink, and drugs, and women, pretended friendship, ingratiated themselves with Larry to the point that he had been willing to commit treason for them. But looking back on it, Larry now saw all this for the obvious manipulation that it was. Larry had stolen the tech for his new “friends” - and then his Orion “friends” had disappeared. Apparently the tech wasn’t what they’d been expecting (which made sense, now that Larry thought of it; the prototype had been kept in an unlocked lab in a mostly unguarded building adjacent to the primary research facility, so it hadn’t exactly been the heist of the century), and they’d left Larry holding the bag.

“The Orions b-backed off,” Larry said. “And I couldn’t k-keep it, so I… I tried to s-s-sell it. Off world.”

The dark man only stared at Larry, perfectly motionless. He hadn’t even blinked yet, Larry realized.

“Nobody was buying,” Larry said. “But t-then s-she shows up at my door a-and she *knows*, a-and I just… let them in. I thought I was going to prison, I d-d-didn’t know they had a b-bomb, I *swear*, a-and I don’t have a-any idea what they’re involved in, so I…”

Suddenly, the dark man moved. With almost agonizingly deliberate slowness, he reached down to pluck Larry’s untouched croissant from Larry’s plate. He brought the pastry to his lips, took a hearty bite, and began to chew slowly. He never once broke eye contact with Larry.

“Hey,” Larry said weakly.

Suddenly, through a mouthful of half-chewed croissant, the dark man spoke.

“What is it?” he asked. Even through the bite of pastry, his voice was low and rich, like a whisper in a dark room that you were certain was empty only a moment before. For a moment, Larry couldn’t find his voice to respond. The dark man chewed, swallowed, then spoke again, more slowly this time.

“What is it?”

“It’s… a croissant,” Larry said.

The man moved with such speed that for a moment Larry was sure he was made of smoke. A knife had come singing out of a sheath at the man’s belt, whistled through the air, and stopped suddenly at Larry’s windpipe. It rested lightly against his neck, but the razor-honed edge was sharp enough that Larry felt a trickle of warm blood oozing out over the blade.

“What is it?” the man asked again.

Larry’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Dimly, he realized that he and the dark man were now *alone* in the cafe. There had only been a few patrons when Larry had entered, but there was no sign of any of them now, nor did Larry see the young barista who had served him the tea manning her post behind the counter. Larry’s mind was reeling, clawing frantically for some kind of purchase on this situation. Suddenly, his addled brain seized on the truth of what the dark man was asking.

“It’s comms tech!” Larry squealed. “Pr-prototype comms tech! I d-don’t know why they wanted it, I swear!”

The tears were running now, along with the blood, and suddenly Larry realized the light pressure of the blade was no longer against his neck. Across the table, the dark man had returned to his original position, hands folded demurely on the table top. Larry realized he hadn’t even seen the man put the croissant down, let alone re-sheathe his knife.

“Thank you, Mr. Declan,” the man said. Then he rose, his eyes still fixed on Larry’s. The man reached down, plucked the croissant off the plate once more, and turned to walk away, leaving the empty plate, the mug of tea, the stolen comms-tech, and a terrified Lawrence “People Call Me Larry” Declan behind him. He did not look back.

* * *=/\=* * *

Scene: House at Alameda de las Pulgas

Raxl and Selyara sat in the dark house, waiting. Well, Raxl was sitting, at any rate. Since their encounter with the mysterious Mister Johnson, Selyara had become more than a little paranoid and neurotic. She was currently pacing nervously to-and-fro, in the semi-dark, silent and catlike, expectant, and jumpy beyond all belief.

Raxl wanted to tell her to relax, but he knew better. Telling a woman to relax was like trying to make friends with a shark by chumming the water. She made another pass, straightened the bric-a-brac on the mantlepiece for the thousandth time, then fiddled with her bandage.

“Stop that, you’re going to tear the new skin before it heals fully.” His voice was loud in Selyara strictly enforced silence. Raxl raised his glass to his lips and took a small sip of the liquid within. The ice shifted and clinked together, a gunshot in the quiet. She spun around on her heel, glaring at him with an indignant expression.

“Will you be quiet?” She snapped, her voice low and hushed. She’d hacked her hair off and dyed the uneven fuzz remaining blonde to help disguise herself, and Raxl couldn’t help thinking that just made her look vaguely mentally unbalanced, especially combined with her restlessness.

“No one can hear us, I mean, I understand paranoia, but this is ridiculous-” Raxl began, but Selyara suddenly stopped her pacing and stood dead still, pressing one finger to her lips.

“Shhh. Do you hear that??” she hissed, her face tense, pale and ghostly in the muffled light that filtered past the curtains. Raxl was about to tell her that she was being crazy, when he heard the slow, deliberate whistling.

Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone. Oh where, oh where could he be? The whistler repeated the phrase slowly once or twice more, and then there was a rapping at the window, the clink of small stones on glass.

“Maybe it’s the back-up you asked for?” Raxl whispered back, optimistically. She gave him a scathing look. “But I’m guessing that we aren’t that lucky. Especially since we’ve already had a run-in today with a whistling psychopath. Maybe we can sneak out before he-”

As if on cue, there was the delicate tinkle of glass breaking, and then the sound of the front door opening.

Step.

Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

Step.

Oh where, oh where can he be?

Step.

With his ears cut short, and his tail cut long.

Step.

Oh where, oh where could he be?

The footsteps echoed in the entry hall, then headed away from them into one of the living spaces on the far side of the house. As he left each room, they could see a flash of light and hear the noise of him melting the doors, sealing off each space, cutting off their escape routes. Raxl peeled back the window, hoping that they would find egress that way, but the drop into the unknown made him think twice. It was high enough that they weren’t assured a safe landing, and Raxl wasn’t willing to risk one or both of them injuring themselves badly enough that they would be unable to run or fight their pursuer. At least they had something approximating a fighting chance right now. Maybe he could distract the assassin, give Selyara a shot at getting the contact she needed so she could use her mind powers on him.

His thoughts were cut short by the creaking of a floorboard below them.

Selyara had been still as a statue, paralyzed by fear, or something else, but in an instant she burst into motion. She grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the room behind him, moving as quickly but quietly as she could to the base of the third story stairs. With a practiced hand, she pried open a hidden panel that lead to a storage area underneath the stairs, and pulled him into it. The area was tight and cramped, slightly too small for two people, but there was no time to second guess it as a hiding place, because as the door clicked shut quietly Raxl heard the sound of Mister Johnson’s footsteps reaching the second floor landing.

They held their breath as he paused by their hiding spot, and Raxl could feel Selyara’s heart pounding as they crouched in the darkness, contorted against each other, and it seemed fast, even for a Vulcan, and he wondered if it was fear.

“I’m *not* scared,” she said breathily and nearly inaudibly to him in a whisper that lacked conviction.

Mister Johnson’s footsteps walked slowly across the floorboards of the landing, and came to a stop somewhere close. There was a long, deliberate pause as he whistled a few bars of his song, and suddenly he spoke.

“Miss Chen, you might as well come out. My employer wants you alive, so I don’t want to hurt you.” Raxl felt Selyara nearly jump out of her skin, and he clamped his hand over her mouth just in time to muffle the squeak that came out of her mouth. She froze again. “But the more you annoy me by playing games, the less gently I’m inclined to treat you. Not to mention nothing was said of your muscular friend. Why don’t you come out, and I promise that I will let him live.”

**Liar, liar, pants on fire.** Selyara’s bitter amusement flickered around the edges of Raxl’s mind. **Stay put… Once he gets up to the third floor, we’ll make a break for it. The spare bedroom on the left has a tree branch outside it that’s just close enough to reach from the window. I used to use it all the-** Her thoughts trailed off, and she replaced it with an image of the bedroom in question and the tree.

They huddled together under the stairs while Mister Johnson checked each room, slowly, methodically. At one point, Raxl could see his shoes through a vent in one walls of their hiding place and he thought that they were done for, but they soon disappeared from view. After what seemed like hours, the footsteps and whistling moved overhead, and they listened, quiet as church-mice as Mister Johnson proceeded up the stairs. Once his steps moved away from the landing they cautiously opened the door and spilled out into the landing, making their way as quietly as possible to the bedroom. Raxl tried the door, but it had been fused closed by their pursuer. Fortunately the house had been maintained in a more anachronistic style, and the wooden door gave easily under his shoulder, splintering into bits. The footsteps overhead began to move rapidly back down the stairs, and Selyara shoved the window open quickly, nimbly leaping out onto the waiting tree branch, and scurrying towards the trunk. Raxl was right behind her, and Mister Johnson was on their heels.

Selyara paused over a flat piece of wall and jumped nimbly onto it, running across the top of it for a couple meters before leaping off it onto a path behind it. Raxl followed suit and they ran, barely ahead of their pursuer. Suddenly Selyara took a hard left into a wooded area, jumping over stumps and wading through weeds. In another couple moments, she disappeared over the edge of a ravine. Raxl followed, but when he reached the bottom, she was nowhere to be found.

Suddenly he was pulled bodily backwards into a large tangle of blackberry canes, getting scraped and scratched by the thorns as he went. He blinked in the darkness. They were in an ancient cement tube, clearly part of an old drainage system of some sort. He could just make out Selyara’s form in the shadows as she went further back into the darkness, and sat down, her back up against the concrete. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down next to her.

Minutes dragged on into hours, and dawn was beginning to break. Selyara had fallen asleep, and though she had started out sitting straight up, over the hours she had slumped and sagged onto Raxl’s shoulder. It was slightly uncomfortable, her head was heavy and dug into his collarbone, but the night had been cold, and the warmth was welcome.

Without warning, Selyara sat straight up, swearing violently. The slew of profanities that tumbled out of her mouth was so uncharacteristic that Raxl was half sure his jaw was hanging open.

“All my equipment is gone. I’m cut off from the bulk of my information network.” Selyara said in response to his unasked question. “If we’re going to find out what Edgerton is up to, and where he is, we’re going to have to go low tech.”

“What about the reinforcements you asked for?”

“With Mister Johnson after us, we can’t afford to wait around. If we are extremely lucky, Michael might be sending down the one person who might be able to anticipate my course of actions, or might have briefed them.” Selyara stood up. “In the meantime, tell me Raxl, how are you at the long con?”
* * *=/\=* * *

NRPG: A post! Mostly.

Brought to you by:
Shawn Putnam
as
Raxl Dreyton
A chump working for no pay

And

Alix Fowler
as
Selyara Chen
Master planner, whose plans always go down the drain.