The woman with the dirty blond hair and the prison tattoos crept through the airducts, her shoulder aching. When she arrived at the room, she removed the grill and slid down. A trolley stood opened, weird machinery in it. She approached it cautiously, but when three metres away from it, something unfolded itself, and buzzed angrily at her. It looked like an oversized fly with too many legs, in a black plastic carapace. She swatted it out of the air, but as it fell, one of its legs touched the puncture wounds in her shoulder, causing the wound to open again. Drops of blood splattered the ground. Grunting with pain, she withdrew into the airduct again, none the wiser.
~~
He knelt next to the robot, his eyes filling with concern. “Oh poor baby, what did they do to you?”
It would be a few hours of work to get it operational again, but if the internal harddisk had not been damaged, he would have good footage of the intruder and his or her purpose.
~~
“On behalf of my nation’s diplomatic corps, I would like to hire a conference room in your hotel, for the duration of this day, refreshments placed in it on beforehand. I would also like a room to refresh myself.” The lady, wearing a haltertop and displaying a dolphin tattooed on her belly, didn’t look like the usual clientele, and the clerk started to mouth a polite refusal that was silenced when she did produce a diplomatic passport.
~~
“Hi there,” she said. “Nice shirt.”
He grunted, smoothing his Italian suit. “Why does EVERYONE mention the shirt?” he asked, complaining.
“It is a rather bright pink. Now, on to business, we haven’t got all day for pleasantries.”
~~
She took the big brass chain from her neck, and twisted the medallion with the big pentagram open. An oversized throwing star slid out. Not perfectly balanced, but bound to make an impact. She threw, but her aim was slightly off, or maybe it was the wind, and the man with the mullet just felt something slide through his hair before the shuriken embedded itself in the support beam next to him. She cursed, with a detail that made you wonder how old this tiny little puppet truly was, and dove, placing a small cylinder on the ground, that immediately began to spray smoke and tear gas around. She beat a hasty retreat.
~~
They made an unlikely pair, the long faced man approaching middle age, absorbed in the match, and the young man with the expensive taste in clothes, leaning back as he made his moves and studying everything but the board. “Why are we playing this game?” he asked at some point, with a wink to a lovely young Japanese student.
“I need to know how you think if we are to work together,” the other answered.
“Weird. All you’ll learn is that I have no patience for chess.”
This post has been edited by Path-Shaper: 25 May 2010 - 12:36 PM
Only someone with this much power could make this many frittatas without breaking any eggs.