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LSS: The Lifecycle of a Heist



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Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:43 pm
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KateHardy says...



\/Luna Lee Taylor\/


Luna nearly jumped when she heard the door close behind her with an odd sense of finality. it was pretty clear at this point that they were definitely heading out, well Dwyn had specifically mentioned they were going to get out of there, but the door closing behind them as the lock clicked shut of its own accord seemed to solidify it quite a bit more and remind her that when they stepped out of here, they were actually going to be done, or at the very least Luna assumed that was what would happen. She hadn't been to anything like this game before, but still it wasn’t like she had zero idea how things worked. Absolutely nothing going the way she’d expected couldn’t be right. She wasn’t that bad at this.

For starters, there hadn't been anything remotely approaching a congratulations. If nothing else whoever was in charge of conducting this had directed the actors to be a little extra harsh and make it seem like they were doubting their ability to ever complete the game. Luna didn't know a lot about business but treating people like that didn't seem like an effective way to get people coming back to play your game again. If Luna didn't know any better, it almost seemed like these people wanted them to be getting out of this place as fast as possible and never coming back.

There was a sound from behind her and Luna realized that Dwyn had just told her to lead them out of here, which meant she was not supposed to be here frozen in place just imagining why this ending had been quite so lackluster. Hoping that the other two would simply think she'd been considering which door would lead them back to the entrance, Luna moved once again, trying to recall exactly what said door was. She had a pretty decent idea of generally where it was, especially relative to where she'd been standing earlier, but now that they'd gone through another door and looked around, it was slightly harder to get her bearings.

One door did seem to be the right one however, and without hesitating for long enough that Dwyn would relinquish her of her current responsibility, Luna marched towards said door. If it ended up not being the one, well she'd deal with that if it came to that. Thankfully, it seemed her subconscious had been paying enough attention to her surroundings despite Luna herself spacing out a bit, and the door opened into a semi familiar hallway. There was every chance that there was more than one doorway leading to a similar looking hallway that wouldn't necessarily lead them outside, but Luna didn't stop to think about it as she walked out, picking up the pace ever so slightly as she realized that they were probably supposed to have left a few minutes ago.

There was undoubtably going to be a few people standing outside to ensure that the three of them did in fact leave and she did not want to run into problems. At least Luna knew that's what the people here wanted them to act like. Given this was a game, them taking a second longer than normal to leave should probably not cause any problems, but at least Dwyn and Conrad seemed to treat it like they couldn't take it easy just yet, so Luna, knowing that following their lead so far hadn't led her too far off course, stuck with the faster pace.

The longer they travelled down the hallway, the more concerned Luna got. Maybe it was the apprehension earlier, but the walk to the table when they'd been coming in hadn't felt nearly this long and Luna was starting to doubt that maybe they'd gone down the wrong hallway after all. A shaft of sunlight coming from somewhere up ahead managed to ease her worries however as it was clear there was some sort of exit coming up ahead

Of course, it was too far off for Luna to tell if it was the door they could maybe leave through or maybe some sort of large window. At this point though, she'd take it. As long as the outside world was visible it meant they could get out of here, and it wasn't like that car they'd arrived in earlier was going to be waiting for them to take them back. Or at least she assumed that was what would happen. No one had mentioned anything about a return trip. For a brief second Luna wondered if she should maybe turn back to confirm this with Dwyn, but then decided that the woman would have already spoken up if Luna was doing something wrong. It wasn't like Dwyn was having her lead them out because Dwyn couldn't. There was no chance the woman didn't have the proper route mapped out.

Her trust managed to pay off soon enough, as finally the doorway they'd come in from earlier came into view. Once again Luna couldn't exactly be certain this was the right one until she'd actually stepped out, not to mention there wasn't even anyone standing there to see them out, but Luna soldiered on, trusting that it wasn't all going to end up being an elaborate ruse and they'd end up on the other side of this building or worse, in some inner courtyard or something that would end up getting them into some sort of extra trouble. For a second, she had wondered if getting to some inner room was part of a side quest of some sort, given Dwyn's idea to check the place out, but given how fast the woman had walked out of said inner room, it was probably not how this was meant to go. If Luna didn't know better, she'd almost think Dwyn had wanted to steal something from here.

Trying not to think too deep into that and what that could possibly mean, Luna continued on, soon stepping into the sunlight as the three of them made their way out the door. As the semi familiar skyline Luna had glimpsed on her way in earlier registered, she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She'd led them out of the right door after all...unless. She shook her head as her mind tried to introduce yet more doubt into the situation. She really needed to stop doing that or she was never going to be able to get anything done. With that in mind, she looked around, seeing if she could spot any sign of the car that had gotten them here.

It wasn't the most distinctive car that Luna had ever been in, but she liked to think her memory was good enough that she'd be able to recognize it again if she saw it. And at the moment, there was nothing in sight that remotely resembled it, which means here suspicious that they were now just going to be left to find their own way back was most likely true. It was starting to feel like a bit of a massive anticlimax now. She'd been imagining this being the craziest part of the whole thing what with the pretense of the whole thing being a heist maybe being finally dropped and some sort of prize maybe being handed out. Not for the first time that day Luna wondered if she had somehow missed something very important that everyone else just knew. Before her brain could talk itself into yet another temporary panic attack in the span of a few minutes, Dwyn interrupted her thoughts.

“Well, one of us needs to call a cab,” said Dwyn, “it wouldn’t do to stand here for longer than necessary.”

"Yes...yup...we should do that, " managed Luna, nodding along like this had been fully obvious to her this whole time. "Of course, they weren't going to wait for us and take us back to the airport or something. But they did get us return tickets, right? Or didn't they? I mean we have the money to buy them easily, but also..." Luna trailed off, face going a deep red as she realized she'd slipped back into rambling mode out of nowhere. Dwyn gave her a look that suggested that Luna's comments were not really worth a response. Conrad somehow seemed to have read that look correctly as well because whatever he'd opened his mouth to add onto the subject of plane tickets seemed to die in his throat.

Trying to hide her embarrassment for the moment, Luna looked out to see if she could somehow hail a cab from here if she was going to have to summon, uber or tuber or one of these things her friends kept mentioning. She really needed to learn this sort of thing a little bit better than the little knowledge she currently possessed on getting around when she didn't have anyone to drive her around or if the place wasn't within walking distance. Luckily for her, the other two didn't seem like they had any similar issues when it came to finding a way to getting back. Within minutes one of the two, Conrad Luna suspected by the way he was looking at it, had managed to summon a cab from somewhere and he was gesturing for the two of them to get in before him.

Smiling, Luna managed to utter something resembling a thank you as she nodded to the man and managed to squeeze herself, luggage, and all. Conrad and his hockey bags were stuffed into the center of the car for some reason, most likely because Dwyn probably wanted to have a way to quickly get out of the car if she had to. It wasn't one that she'd summoned after all and then soon Dwyn was sliding in, a lot more graceful than the two of them combined. Conrad once again seemed to be about to say something, probably about taking them to the airport when Dwyn directed the driver to some random location which she somehow seemed to know. Luna stared at her in shock. Was this some sort of side quest after all?

Dwyn seemed to have read the pretty obvious question on Luna's face however as she proceeded to roll her eyes before nodding almost imperceptibly towards the bags that Luna was currently holding onto. The one that had been stuffed full of clothes. Luna almost nodded back before deciding maybe that was too obvious and settled for a smile. She had been thinking about when they were going to bust out said clothes but had assumed that maybe they'd change at the airport itself. She supposed Dwyn wanted to change their appearance slightly earlier given they did now have to essentially got away. It was an interesting medium at any rate. Given how Dwyn had acted earlier, Luna had almost expected her to just take off without them, but perhaps she wanted to get back to Chicago first, or maybe it was because the game was somehow finally over even though Luna just couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't quite right there.

She didn't let herself dwell on that just yet however, knowing that until they were safely on the plane headed back to Chicago, things were still up in the air somewhat. Dwyn directed their driver to what appeared to some sort of fairly random clothing store where she proceeded to march in, not even waiting for the two of them to follow. After only a moment of hesitation Luna followed suit and she could hear Conrad trying to do the same. Just as Conrad was about to tell their driver to wait for them Dwyn appeared again and proceeded to stuff some cash into the driver's hand and tell him to drive somewhere. If the man was confused, he didn't show it, nodding before peeling out of the parking lot.

Luna didn't think much of it at this point. She'd seen that particular trick pulled off in countless heist novels, and she was glad to see that it was at least a usable tactic, even though it seemed to be a bit late in said heist when they didn't even have any of the items on them to be using such a trick. Still, she didn't try and overthink it too much, already seeing Dwyn make us some sort of story to whoever was running the store as she just made her way to the changing rooms without even waiting to be told. Things were coming to an end, and it was pretty obvious what they were here to do. There was simply no point in trying to ask Dwyn everything and just getting even more embarrassed. She'd had enough of that for a while now. Maybe she could get back to the villager trading hall she'd been building in Minecraft. Wrangling hundreds of video game NPC's for absolutely no good reason would help her forgot about all that for a bit.

Changing into whatever looked the most different to what she'd been wearing, Luna was in and out of the changing room in ten minutes to almost run right into Conrad who was standing there awkwardly holding his hockey things. He seemed to do a double take at her outfit change before he seemed to come to some sort of realization and he promptly disappeared in search of a changing area. Luna wondered if he hadn't understood something Dwyn had said or if the woman hadn't bothered to tell him anything. She wouldn't be surprised either way.

Soon enough, Dwyn emerged from the room next to Luna's and it seemed like it was her turn to a double take at the sight of Luna already ready to go. Whatever expression came onto her face didn't last long however and woman simply gave Luna a nod. The lack of any sort of remark made Luna internally fist pump the air, knowing she had probably done the right thing here. After a few more minutes of waiting Conrad arrived. He didn't look nearly as different as he probably should have but Dwyn, either no longer caring because they were essentially done with the heist or because she was tired of yelling instructions nodded at him and proceeded to march out. Once again Luna followed without question to find another cab sitting there waiting for them judging by how quickly Dwyn slid inside. It definitely wasn't the one they'd come here in, and Luna didn't have to long to reflect on that anyway because the cab was already leaving before Conrad had even managed to close the door on his side having gotten in last.

The ride to the airport wasn't eventful after that, this time Dwyn directing the driver in that direction once they'd gotten a bit of distance from the store. The silence was almost as awkward as the previous ride, but Luna didn't dare take a call here. That could wait until they were all back in Chicago and she was going to have to plan some sort of way to get back home, provided of course there wasn't another shoe waiting to drop like her instincts kept trying to tell her for some reason she couldn't fathom.

Before Luna knew it, they were getting out at the airport, her mind now immediately jumping to the idea of having to book the tickets back to Chicago. She had ones that would take her back home from Chicago, but judging from the way Dwyn had spoken earlier, it was pretty clear they were going to have to book their own to get back to Chicago first. After all, the other two did kind of live there, at least Luna was 85% sure Conrad lived there, (Dwyn may as well be from Antarctica for all Luna knew) and whoever had booked their tickets to this place hadn't given them ones to get back.

Dwyn clearly knew what she was doing as she marched off almost immediately. Luna probably should have been slightly more concerned than normal that Dwyn hadn't even gestured for them to follow her. It was almost as if she was planning to run back on her own. Conrad however seemed to be headed in that same direction too, so Luna decided she may as well follow. She knew next to nothing when it came to pulling something like this off, so she was going to have to watch and learn anyway if Dwyn wasn't going to do it for her. Well, who was she kidding, there was no chance whatsoever that Dwyn was going to do it for her, especially not at this moment when all appeared to be done and dusted.

Keeping up with and keeping track of a Dwyn on a mission was a difficult proposition at the best of times, especially for Luna, and in the midst of an airport that was fairly crowded, it was proving to be a very difficult task at the moment as the woman wove through the crowds with what was clearly a practiced ease while Luna was doing her best to walk fast without outright running after the woman and looking unnecessarily suspicious. Luckily for her, Conrad was also lumbering his way behind Dwyn, and he was a much easier target to keep track of that Dwyn ever would be, not to mention he didn't move nearly as fast as Dwyn was doing at the moment.

It wasn't long before both of them were coming to a stop however, and Luna waited patiently, trying to lean in close enough to hear what they were saying as they bought the tickets while doing her best to make sure she didn't end up accidentally getting too close either. It was proving to be a bit of a delicate balance given Dwyn wasn't the loudest when it came to speaking, but safe in the hope that Conrad was also definitely going in the same direction, Luna didn't let that bother her too much. She should be able to hear what Conrad was saying, or if she absolutely had to, she could probably ask the man. Given how he'd helped her out with the trains she had no doubt he'd probably buy it for her too, but she was entirely too embarrassed to ask just yet unless she absolutely had to.

Fifteen minutes later, surprisingly without as much trouble as Luna had been expecting going into the situation, she was the proud new owner of a ticket on the next plane back to Chicago. She'd just about managed to stutter her way through the whole thing and now she quietly continued following after the other two. It was starting to be a bit of an odd procession given that Dwyn still hadn't acknowledged the two of them at all, and Conrad while he'd looked behind and locked eyes with Luna on a couple of occasions, hadn't made any sort of move to talk. This meant Luna had been relegated to just following the two, doing her best to look like she knew what she was doing while also hoping that the other two would do or say something. It seemed like Dwyn had pretty much cut herself off from their little group now that they'd functionally finished off with their little mission and Conrad seemed to be torn between following in Dwyn's footsteps and trying to make contact. From what Luna had heard, they were at the very least going to be on the same flight back, so knowing that once they were through security and everything, they had a bit of a wait in store, Luna didn't try to press for anything. Once they'd waited for long enough, she was sure at least Conrad had to crack, even if Dwyn likely never would.

Her theory was put to the test not too long after when they were finally all seated down at the gate, waiting patiently for the officials to call them to board. For some reason they'd managed to sit in relatively close proximity, Dwyn on the far right of the row of seats and Conrad and Luna a seat apart on the far left. It wasn't too different to how it had been on the way there, not just in the seating arrangement but also the atmosphere that currently engulfed them. The only real difference was the absences of the one and only red shirt in a different seat that the three of them cautiously peeked at every so often. That particular absence was so far turning out to be a bad thing for the moment given that without that common activity for them to participate in, the general awkwardness was only growing.

Dwyn continued to maintain her silence with ease. It didn't seem like she was even trying if Luna had to be honest with herself. Conrad on the other hand looked close to cracking. He'd done his best to stare determinedly at the ground for some time now, but he'd started to look between the two of them with increasing frequency in the past five minutes and it looked like he was just about to say something. That was the exact moment that they chose to call the first-class passengers and both Conrad and Luna exchanged a very deliberate look as Dwyn proceeded to get up and stalk off. There wasn't so much as a wave involved and Dwyn was gone. A myriad of thoughts swirled through Luna's mind, starting out with the idea that Dwyn had definitely abandoned them at this point. She had serious doubts that they'd even be able to run into her once the plan landed in Chicago. Then there was also the fact that there was definitely enough money on her right now to buy a first-class ticket, but she'd just automatically defaulted away from it. How could she possibly have missed that? Of course, Dwyn was going to fly first class.

It looked like once again Conrad was going to say something, especially after this latest revelation, but before he and definitely before Luna could think to work up the courage to that, they were already calling for their seat numbers. Luna really wanted to talk this through but postponing things in the hope of catching the two after the plane landed and because Luna was going to take any excuse she could to prolong this conversation, Luna got up, charging into the line of passengers already forming to board the plane. She didn't look back to see if Conrad was going to follow her, not until it was too late anyway. By then there was already five passengers behind her and despite his size making it impossible to miss him in the crowd, there was no way she could talk.

She knew that at this point, the only person she was successfully fooling was herself, but she couldn't really do much about that at the moment, not until they had landed. That fact became quite clear once the flight attendant directed her down the hallway she was supposed to go in and she found her seat number. For starters, she hadn't even passed by Dwyn. It was probably a stretch to imagine Dwyn had picked a seat number to avoid Luna given that Dwyn had selected her seat before Luna and had been well out of earshot when Luna picked hers, but that didn't stop the thought crossing her mind. Then later once she sat down, she could see the tall form of Conrad squeeze into a seat a couple of rows in front of her. He didn't even seem to spot her, despite it looking like he was in fact trying to find her.

Once that was done, Luna turned back to the window next to her, opening it before she turned to the entertainment system in front of her. Hoping to take her mind off of everything currently plaguing it for the next few hours, she plugged into the earphones they'd provided her with and settled down. Forgetting all of this sounded like a great idea for her own sanity as well as Dwyn and Conrad when she inevitably had to ramble something and do some sort of goodbye once the plan had landed, assuming of course that she was even going to be able to catch up to Dwyn, who'd probably walk away as fast as could be considered not running.

With those thoughts swirling in her mind, Luna settled into browse the selection available on the plane and before long, she managed to push those thoughts to the back as one of her favorite movies began to play in front of her. The flight passed by pretty calmly. Not even a surprise patch of turbulence to throw things into disarray. It was pretty much an ideal journey and before long, Luna was pulling the earphones out of her ears that were half ringing from the constant shooting that had gone down in the final movie she'd just about managed to sneak in. As she blinked to renter the normal world after having been lost in a few different planets over the course of the last five hours, all the thoughts she'd pushed aside earlier came rushing right back.

Luna let out a sigh. For better or for worse it was all going to end up coming to a head a few minutes from now, and given she hadn't managed to escape these thoughts for even a second once her distraction was over, she might as well embrace them for the moment until she had to set about figuring out how she was going to be getting home.

Doing her best to get up in the stream of people doing their hardest to leave without falling over and dropping the luggage she had to stand on her tiptoes to reach, Luna just about managed to get herself moving. She would've much preferred to wait till the massive stream of people had already left and she was the last one off the plane, but she was going to have to brave this human tsunami if she was going to catch up to Conrad who was definitely not having any trouble getting a clear path from what she could see up ahead. Dwyn had probably already gotten off the plane given she was so far up ahead. Luna hadn't exactly seen Dwyn to see which seat she was on, but Luna would bet money that it was pretty close to the front row so that Dwyn would be able to make as quick an exit as was feasible.

Fighting her way through the crowd, Luna eventually made it to the exit from the plane. Doing her usual smile and barely audible thank you to the crew at the doorway, she proceeded to walk as fast as she could to catch up Conrad. She couldn't afford to lose them here. It was now or never. There was a slight chance that Conrad might end up waiting for her or at the very least get bottlenecked at the baggage claim they'd all have to visit, but with Dwyn, even that wasn't a given, and Luna did want to at least say a simple goodbye to the woman.

The chase, not chase lasted for a few minutes as they all finally ended up at the baggage claim. This was really starting to become something of a movie, the only thing that wasn't accurate to the big screen was the fact that the world was not at stake and Dwyn was (probably) not carrying anything that could somehow end the world unless a specific button was pressed before a specific time. There was also the fact that Dwyn was probably not trying to run away from Luna either, she was just more efficient when it came to getting out of a place. At least that's what Luna was allowing herself to believe for the moment. She didn't know why, but the idea that Dwyn would just run away from her without so much as a proper goodbye felt like it was going to cause a little bit more hurt than Luna had been expecting.

The baggage claim portion of things went about as well as Luna had predicted. Dwyn was already leaving when Luna was just about arriving, Conrad now in tow as Luna had managed to race ahead of him once she'd actually spotted Dwyn again. The pretense of just walking fast had been abandoned a few minutes ago as Luna had basically run through this part of the airport to catch up to Dwyn. Now she was staring at the conveyer bringing in the bags giving some serious thought to the idea of taking off after Dwyn and coming back for the bag later. Her fear over losing the bag won over however, because Luna resigned herself to watching as Dwyn marched off, praying for the bag to magically appear in the next few minutes. The chances of that were growing steadily lower the longer than Luna watched, but she didn't give up hope, not just yet.

Just as Dwyn disappeared around a corner, Luna spotted her luggage. She was off in a flash. With a strength she didn't even know she actually possessed, Luna had grabbed her luggage and was charging through the airport. She was totally done pretending or waiting or doing anything else. She was going to catch up to that woman and have some sort of interaction, even if it was going to be Dwyn pushing her away like she was a stranger. She had no idea where that particular idea had come from, but Luna's brain knew how best to conjure up the worst-case scenarios even at the best of times.

As she neared the exit, Luna almost did a double take at the site. Just outside the doors stood Dwyn. Luna was just about to dismiss that as her simply waiting for to call a cab, when she sees that Dwyn was quite clearly looking at the inside of the airport, eyes searching for something. It was entirely possible that Dwyn was just going to meet another one of those associates she said she had. Luna still didn't have any idea what any of that was about. Maybe it was like the three questions you could ask someone in an escape room. Before Luna had time to sink properly into that tangent her brain had invited her out on, Dwyn's eyes unmistakably stopped on hers.

Luna barely had time to process through everything that could happen as a result of their eyes meeting when Dwyn made a 'come here" gesture with her hand. Luna almost wanted to look behind her to see if there was someone else, in fact she couldn't resist and she did only to find empty air. It appeared Conrad hadn't acquired his bag just yet. Luna looked around one more time for good measure before her eyes met Dwyn again. The woman was still looking at her, and the rolling of her eyes was pretty clear in what it wanted her to do. Luna swallowed the lump that was suddenly forming in her throat and started moving again, this time not running, but still walking at a pretty fast pace headed straight for Dwyn.

It was probably barely a minute of walking, but it felt like it had been almost an hour when Luna finally made it out of the doors and stood in front of Dwyn, bag by her side and hands clenching and unclenching. She really should carry more things around to play around with when it came to moments like this.

"So, umm...it was nice...umm...worki...heisting...umm...with you," Luna stammered out once the silence had grown to a point where even she couldn't bear to just stand there silently.

“Let’s wait a bit until Conrad catches up, shall we?” said Dwyn, “we can’t be doing this goodbye twice after all.”

“Oh umm. Yup, that makes sense, yes, why not…” stammered Luna, going beet red again. She tended to do that entirely too often around this woman. She really needed to do something about that going forward. Her brain proceeded to remind her than that wasn’t going to matter anyway since she would likely never see Dwyn again. Before Luna could process that thought, Dwyn was speaking again.

“Where is Radical anyway? I thought we was ahead of you when coming out of the plane?” asked the woman.

"Oh, he was...umm...well he was standing at the baggage claim when I last saw him," Luna managed, proud of herself for only minimal stammering on that last sentence," of course maybe he's coming in now, or he went somewhere else. I umm..I ran..I uhh left there too quickly to be able to tell. Sorry."

“Well, I suppose he’ll come out of here eventually,” said Dwyn.

"Of course," managed Luna to that before she fell silent once again, the air of awkwardness building up once again after that exchange. She turned back towards the airport, hoping that Conrad was going to emerge soon so that this conversation could come to some sort of end. Getting brushed off by Dwyn, Luna could deal with, but this sudden wait as she had to look forward to potentially getting brushed off was turning out to be a much worse fate than her mind could handle at the moment here.

Luckily for her, like some sort of hockey playing, extremely muscular angel Conrad chose that moment to stumble into view. If Luna didn't know any better, he seemed to almost have a casual pace to him, but Luna could see that his eyes were much like her own, clearly searching for something, or more likely someone. It didn't take too long for him to turn his eyes to the exit and spot them. Luna looking down at her bag by this point while Dwyn, Luna could see was gesturing to him much like she'd done earlier to Luna herself.

The man rushed over a lot faster than Luna had, probably due to the fact that people gave him a wide berth the moment he started walking faster than normal pace. Whether it was just his size or the large hockey bag that was now swinging around rather dangerously as he half ran half walked, it was anybody's guess.

He was soon sliding to a stop right beside them as Dwyn gestured to the side so that they could move away from the exit before someone reminded that they had in fact been inadvertently blocking the doorway for the past few minutes. Once they stood to the side, done with everything that could possibly delay this conversation, the silence only continued to build for a few minutes as all three of them probably thought of something to say. Well at least that's what Luna was doing, and what Luna was pretty positive Conrad was doing judging by his scrunched-up expression. Dwyn was an entirely different matter.

Unsurprisingly, it was Dwyn who finally took the plunge and ended up breaking the silence.

“So, we finished,” said Dwyn, before adding in a slighter quitter voice, “somehow without messing up.”

“Yup…umm yes…even though something seems to tell me we aren’t fully done yet, we are,” managed Luna, wondering why she’d even voiced her fear to everyone. It really was something random that she knew was only her brain being paranoid. Maybe she just wanted to make sure that everyone felt the same way. There were times her brain’s paranoia had paid off after all. This wasn’t turning out to be one of those after all, as the other two barely seemed to react.

“Well, my bank account tells me otherwise,” said Dwyn, lowering her voice ever so slightly.

Luna nodded, doing her best to work up the courage to blurt out the final part she wanted to say here before Dwyn, who was starting to glance around for a cab was going to quickly charge off.

“I... umm...don’t know how I even got to this point, but I... umm…I might miss…” began Luna before she was cut off a little abruptly by Dwyn.

“You know what, maybe you did learn a thing or two after all, “said Dwyn, “not bad middle schooler. Well, toodles.”

Before Luna could even begin to process what on Earth that had been about, the woman proceeded to direct a little wave at the two of them, one which Conrad returned with a spluttered “Catch you later” before the woman was walking in the direction of a cab, one which she proceeded to quickly slide into as it drove off in double quick time.

“Well, that was quick, “said Conrad,” can’t say I’m surprised. So, how are you going to be going back?”

“Oh, I’ll manage,” said Luna quickly, maybe a little too quickly, but she was reaching her emotional maximum for the day rather quickly here. She really didn’t want to be spending too long talking if they were all definitely going their separate ways never to reunite again. “Dwyn’s always been that way I suppose.” She added the last part as an afterthought, not really knowing why she said it, although she felt like she had to. The expression on Conrad’s face wasn’t the most desirable, but it looked almost like he needed to hear that. Maybe. What did Luna know about emotions after all?

“Well, in that case,” said Conrad, holding out a hand to shake. “It was nice working with you.”

“It was nice working with you two,” said Luna. “We really did pull off a pretty insane thing there. I didn’t ever imagine it was going to be this fun. I mean, I knew it was going to be fun. That’s why I even signed up for this whole thing in the first place. It’s not every day you drop everything and run for a game. But umm….it was nicer than I thought it’d be, and you two played your part in that.”

“Glad to hear that.”

“I will head out then. I think you also live around here, but I need to actually be going back inside here and figuring out how I’ll be getting back home,” said Luna, managing one last smile at the man.

“Well then, that’s that,” said Conrad, before adding as almost an afterthought,” maybe I’ll see you around.”

“You never know,” said Luna. She gave the man a short wave, before Luna turned around, walking a few feet away. She didn’t fully know what she was doing. She was definitely going to have to make a call or two to figure out her next move, but she knew she had to get a few feet away from Conrad and look like she knew what she was doing, or the man was probably not going to leave and that would be a bit too embarrassing. She could manage this. She was supposed to be an adult.

As Luna walked a bit further away, she could just out of the corner of her eye see Conrad give her one last look before the man shouldered his many bags, and turned away, already eyeing up a vehicle somewhere off in the distance. It wasn't long before she could spot Conrad getting into said vehicle and before long Luna was standing alone at the airport, this whole heist done for better or for worse, now having to figure out how best to be getting back home.

Luna decided that if she was going to have to reorganize her thoughts and plan a way back she'd have to start by getting all of her stuff, which meant returning to the room she'd spent that one night in and maybe spending a bit of time there brainstorming the best way to go about this was in her best interests as well given that this was going to be a bit sooner of a return time than planned which meant while she could always just stay around until the time her currently booked plane was scheduled to depart, or she could book a new one or do the smart thing and muster enough courage to figure out how to move her booking up to something more recent. It couldn't possibly be that hard. She'd seen her dad do things like that all the time. Maybe she should have paid more attention the few times her dad tried to actually show her how to do that sort of thing.

With this fresh plan in mind, Luna brought out her phone, trying to map out how far her previous hotel was from the airport. If it was going to be at least somewhat within walking distance, that was the option she wanted to go with, calling for a cab was not the sort of thing she wanted to do. Then she remembered the fact that she did actually have a few things on her, which meant she couldn't just try and lug it all back herself on foot anyway. Sighing, Luna resigned herself to having to call on something. Either that or ditch the clothes and as much as Luna didn't feel like she'd ever wear the atrocities she'd bought there on Dwyn's unspoken command, she felt like she couldn't just throw them away either. She was going to be keeping them, even if it was for them to just gather dust in the bottom of her closet for the rest of time.

With that thought settled, Luna set about summoning a ride, and once she was safely bundled into a car, she produced the address she'd decided to write down so she could avoid having to say it and inevitably cause an accidental confusion with all her stammering. It wasn't long before she was then pulling up into the hotel and she was quickly walking up to her room. If the people at the hotel were wondering why she'd never turned up last night despite having definitely paid for it, they didn't bother to ask her. Luna honestly wondered if they'd even noticed or cared. As long as they were paying, they probably had very little time to waste wondering about whether or not their guests were wasting their money on empty hotel rooms or not. At least Luna hoped that was what would happen. She did not want to be subject to any sort of interrogation at any point today.

Luna sank into the bed quickly as she lay there for a few minutes, just trying to process everything that had happened and catch her breath. She knew she was going to have to unpack all the thoughts flying through her head at some point, and maybe the best way to do that was going to be once she was back, and perhaps with Sadie. It felt only reasonable to discuss all of this with her given she was the one who'd given her the opportunity in the first place, and she'd want to know, Luna had promised to tell her after all. And knowing that had to happen, Luna didn't know if she could handle trying to unpack these emotions twice, so for now they were going to stay bottled in while she figured out how best to make sure she could get home.

After a little poking around on her laptop she finally managed to figure out how to get her flight time moved up. It was surprisingly not as complicated as she thought it was going to be and did not require any more embarrassing human contact. The how to do x videos on YouTube were really stacking up in number for increasingly specific things, not that she was ever going to admit to her parents that she'd used one of those to move her flight up. As that thought flashed through her mind, she realized she needed to maybe call them and let them know she was coming. She had made sure to give them updates when she could and they'd avoided calling because of her warning that she was potentially going to be too busy to answer unless she called herself, but now if she was going to be going home, a bit of a warning seemed like it was only appropriate. Explaining this whole thing was probably not needed to inform them she was coming back, although she was going to have to tell them most of this too. Considering her options for a second later, she decided she may as well surprise them. Something told her that running by Sadie's place before she went home would be a good idea. The only slight spanner this plan threw into the works was her needing to find some form of transport to get to Sadie's house instead of calling her father to pick her up.

Once she'd booked something to deal with that new problem, Luna once again flopped onto the bed beside her. Everything was ready for her to wrap up and run back to the airport. She'd be back home before she knew it and she'd soon be able to return to her normal old life, preferably after she'd had a long chat with Sadie about this and stopped all the feelings that were currently nagging away at her, not to mention the ever present concern that there was more to all of this than she'd initially anticipated. Even Dwyn's parting remark was now echoing through her. She knew that the woman was definitely not the sort of person who'd do anything resembling a sappy goodbye, but those last words were a bit more confusing and thought provoking in an entirely different way which when combined with all the weirdness that had gone down in the drop off point, made Luna question a lot of things she'd seen in the past couple of days. It was yet another thing she was going to have to try and run through Sadie. She'd know a lot better about deciphering humans than Luna ever will.

With another one of her problems filed away to be looked at later, Luna managed to finally roll herself off from the bed and set about making sure everything she'd brought here with her was packed and ready to go. It was time for her to return home. It took a surprisingly short amount of time given that Luna hadn't really gotten the most time to actually unpack most of her stuff, and she hadn't brought that much stuff with her anyway. Before long, Luna had marshalled everything she’d be carrying back onto her shoulders and she was heading out of the hotel, having checked out. Another cab was waiting outside to take her back to the airport she'd been at only a few hours ago and soon she was going through the terminal, looking for the gate she needed to be waiting at. This part felt a lot more familiar than it had not too long ago when they were flying out for the drop. And now that she knew she was going home, despite all of the thoughts that nagged at her, she was finally able to properly smile, knowing that being back home would start the process of putting all of this behind her finally. It wasn't really going to be easy, but she knew it'd be possible. Already dreaming up the plans for the Minecraft sessions she'd missed while being out here, Luna decided she may as well catch a bit of sleep on this particular flight. It seemed as good a time as any.

Luna awoke with a jolt as the plane touched down. She slowly came to her senses, realizing that after all that travelling, things were finally coming to a point where she'd finally be home. Only once she let herself realize did she feel just how much she'd missed being here. For the first time she understood why everyone else in the plane seemed to want to run out of there as fast as they could even if it was the least efficient way of doing so. Still, as she normally did, she hung back, just stepping out briefly to wrestle her hand luggage down. With that hugged to her chest, she sat back in her seat and waited for the flood of nonstop humans to slow to a trickle. Once she was sure she wasn't going to get toppled over, she joined the fray, making her way out with slower steps borne out of relief, nothing like the frantic pace she'd maintained in the flight she'd gotten out of earlier or the steps of quiet anticipation like she'd experienced much earlier in the day when they were still headed towards the drop off point. Making her through the airport and out seemed to take a lot less time than it had earlier in the day, although that was almost definitely because she was no longer chasing after anyone trying not to get lost in a crowd.

It wasn't long before she managed to find the car waiting for her, this time one that she'd specifically ordered and not a random mysterious one she had to think about carefully five times before she managed to get in. It was certainly a lot less stressful, and the car ride was also probably going to be much less awkward because she was just going to be the only one in there. Okay, perhaps it was still going to be awkward sitting there in silence all by herself, but that was an awkwardness she was somewhat used to. Whatever was happening earlier there in the car was an entirely different level of awkwardness, a level that she didn't really like all the much.

With that in mind, Luna pulled out her phone. Even if she did want to surprise her parents later on by getting there earlier than she was supposed to, she should probably call up Sadie to give her a heads up, just in case there was something going on there where Sadie wouldn't be able to deal with Luna and all her bags while Luna rattled off the whole experience to her. Suddenly she wondered if she should've made this call a bit earlier as the driver pulled out headed towards the address that Luna had just handed the man. Trying not to think too hard about what would happen if she had to awkwardly tell the man to go towards her house instead, Luna dialed Sadie's number.

Sadie picked up almost instantly. For a second Luna wondered if Sadie had somehow been waiting for a call before she realized the girl probably just had her phone on her all the time. It wouldn't exactly surprise her if that was true. Trying not to overthink even that and wanting to cut to the heart of the matter, Luna cleared her brain once again, and managed a quick "Hi".

"Hey," began Sadie," How are you? Did you find some time to talk again? What's going on? You were being kind of mysterious the other time there? I hope nothing went wrong after that. I was thinking about calling you so many times in the past few hours, but I just thought I'd wait for a call from you just in case you know. You can never really tell with these things, at least not with this one."

"Heyy, slow down, Sadie," began Luna, "wow, I can't believe I'm the one saying that for a change."

"Sorry...I was getting a bit nervous..." began Sadie before she seemed to check herself for some reason. "...you know because...I want to know how this game went and everything. I was the one who sent you on it an everything. It wouldn't be nice for me not to check on how the whole thing goes."

Luna smiled. "Of course. Yeah. That's totally understandable. Feel free to ramble anytime you feel like...not that there'll be other situations to make you nervous any time soon, I mean not that there won't, but I will...umm..."

"I think it’s my turn to say the slow down thing," said Sadie. Luna could hear the girl chuckling as she said it.

"Yes," said Luna, already feeling her face heat up. "Umm...but well, I umm, I should probably answer those questions first and then tell you what I called you to say."

"Oh, you can tell me that first. Those questions can wait a bit," said Sadie," I'm sure your time is a bit limited now anyway. No need to waste it for too long. Fire away. What did you want to say?"

"No, it’s okay, I do have a time, and I think I can answer those questions in some pretty good detail in a minute actually, but you did remind me that this particular message is a little bit more on the urgent side."

"Yeah, so go ahead, spit it out before you choke on it," said Sadie. Luna took a deep breath, calming herself for a second before she had to go ahead and pop the big question.

"I. Umm...are you free right now?" asked Luna.

"Uh...what?" asked Sadie, sounding understandably confused and Luna realized that she'd started from completely the wrong angle here. She really wasn't very good at the whole making conversation thing.

"What I umm...meant to say is..umm, would it be okay if I like came over there in a few minutes, well actually umm...." Luna trailed off as she checked her watch, the GPS on her phone and did some very quick mental maths. "Ten minutes. That would be ten minutes."

"WHAAT?"

"Sorry, you're probably busy," began Luna immediately, backtracking as she took in Sadie's tone. Clearly, she was much too busy and did not want to bother with Luna at the moment.

"Noooo," said Sadie, probably realizing what her response had just sounded like. "I was just surprised. Sorry. Does this mean that you're like back already? Did you go back home? Are you at the airport? Do you need me to come pick you up? What's going on? Sorry in advance for all the questions, but this has thrown me for a bit of a loop here."

"No worries," said Luna, smile suddenly returning to her face much larger and much goofier than she probably wanted, but she didn't care right now. "I umm...yeah I'm back, I'm on my way from the airport actually, I kind of wanted to stop by your place first, talk this out and then go surprise my parents cause I am back a bit earlier than we initially anticipated."

"OH WOW," said Sadie and Luna almost had to take the phone away from her ear to avoid going temporarily deaf. " First of all, yes, I am so totally free, please come over here like right now, second of all, I'm so glad to hear you're back so early. Wow. I am trying to process this right now. I want to ask like half a million questions right now, but I'm gonna wait till you make it here, so I think I'll hang up now and go get ready."

"Get ready?" questioned Luna.

"I am literally the only one in the house, and you're coming from such a long trip, I need to at least find something for us to drink," began Sadie, "don't worry about it. Just come right in, I'll leave the front door unlocked."

"Okay, bye," said Luna as Sadie, sounding more excited than Luna had ever seen her friend shouted a bye. There was the sound of someone jumping off a bed before the line went dead.

Luna clutched the phone in her hand for a second longer, taking a deep breath. That had gone a lot better than she had allowed herself to believe which means she was going to finally get to unload all of this for a moment. It probably wasn't going to be terribly fair to unload everything on Sadie, and she definitely wasn't going to do that, but maybe Sadie could at least help her figure out some of the things currently plaguing her and make sense of half the things Luna knew she just didn't have the social intelligence required to actually figure out. In general, having a second opinion on this, one that wouldn't be biased like her parents was going to be a very important thing to figuring out the jumble of emotions she had surrounding this whole thing. These thoughts carried her all the way to Sadie's house, and she was stepping out, doing her best to drag out all her bags with her.

The driver was quick to leave, peeling out of the driveway almost before she'd managed to get her bags in some semblance of an order. She wondered for a second if they were going to cause some sort of complication. She had forgotten to mention that she had her luggage on her, although she had mentioned she was coming straight from the airport. Sadie would make that connection, wouldn't she? She didn't really get too long to worry about that however because the door not too far away had opened and Sadie was already charging out of the house.

For a brief second Luna wondered if someone had broken into the house and Sadie was running out in fear of her life. Or worse if maybe Sadie was running out to chase her away having second thoughts. All of that barely had time to process however as the girl in question was clearly a sporting a brilliant smile on her face and within about ten seconds had latched herself around Luna like an anaconda attempting to suffocate its prey. Luna would be lying if she said she'd ever though that had been a possibility. Sure, they'd hugged before, but Luna didn't think they were good enough friends for Sadie to do her flying hug greeting that Luna had witnessed several times before. The fact that Luna considered Sadie a good enough friend but thought Sadie didn't see her that way was completely beside the point there.

It took her a second longer to realize that she'd spent so long trying to figure out why Sadie was even hugging her or whether it was normal that she'd completely forgotten to hug her back so now she was startled back into reality as Sadie seemed to pull away a little too quickly, a somewhat guilty look on her face.

"Sorry, I know you're not the biggest fan of hugging and all," she began. "I just...it’s good to see you."

Luna smiled. Maybe there were somehow at the hugging stage of things after all. She was also strangely starting to miss the warmth that said hug had created. She didn't utter a word, this time wrapping herself around Sadie.

"I definitely don't mind a hug, especially from my best friend," said Luna, the title slipping out without her even noticing. Sadie seemed to tense ever so slightly at it, but her arms were snaking around Luna before Luna could pull away and start apologizing about it. Instead, Luna settled for pulling her arms just a little bit tighter around her friend. "I missed you too."

They stayed that were for maybe a second longer than you were normally supposed to under the circumstance, but Luna wasn't complaining. After the days of being in a place that might as well have been another country, interacting with strangers every day, sinking into this embrace with someone so familiar just felt relaxing on a level Sadie didn't even believe relaxation was capable of achieving.

Maybe it was because she just hadn't allowed herself the time to think about something other than heist, but Luna hadn't realized just how much she had been missing home until now she was finally here. The smile on her face was ridiculous once Sadie finally released her from the hug and pulled away, although she still stood a bit closer than she normally might have.

"So... are you going to finally give me a proper answer to that question?" began Sadie, raising an eyebrow.

"Hmm...to which question are you referring?" asked Luna, honestly trying to decide which one Sadie would want an answer for most out of the twenty or so that she had fired at Luna on the phone.

"Oh, for the..." began Sadie, "fine. I'll just ask it again. How are you doing? Like really? You didn't seem fully capable of answering that one other time you called either. So...one final time just in case you forgot again. How are you?"

"Good," began Luna, automatically settling into the standard response she was a little too used to giving out. Sadie already seemed to be frowning at her answer so Luna let herself take a breath, letting all her mixed feelings about the past few days come to the surface and answered as honestly as she could manage.

"I really am good," she started," maybe not great. I genuinely don't know how to feel about a couple of things sometimes, but I think overall...especially now that I'm finally home, and with you...I... Am definitely good." Luna nodded a couple of times at the end of it, a much for herself as it were for Sadie.

"That's good. That's umm..." began Sadie, before she suddenly slapped a hand on her forehead and nearly screamed. "OH NO. I am so bad at this. Oh, my goodness. You must think I am the absolute worst. Oh dear. This is very embarrassing."

"Sadie, what are you going on about?" asked Luna, confused once again about where this going. In the span of a few hours, she was finding her friend to have a lot more drama in her than she'd previously thought otherwise. Not that it was exactly a bad development. In fact, she thought it was adorable.... Luna’s train of thought derailed as if it had just run headfirst into a mountain. Where on Earth had [i[that[/i] come from?

"I completely forgot to invite you inside, and here I am grilling you about everything out in the driveway, and all your bags are just scattered around you and everything. Oh my goodness. I am the absolute worst host. I am so sorry for keeping you standing here for so long. You must be tired. I know you're way too polite to tell me to just invite you in already. I am so sorry. Come inside. We'll sit down and get something to drink. Then we can have this talk."

"Oh, it’s totally fine," said Luna, moving forward out of some sort of impulse to pat Sadie on her shoulder. "You're good. I completely forgot we were just standing in the driveway too. I would like to take you up on that offer of sitting down and getting something to drink though. This is going to be a bit of a long story if I'm going to be answering all of your questions.

Sadie beamed. "Come on, lemme help you with some of those." On that note, she proceeded to immediately grab almost all of Luna's bags and lug them towards the door. Grabbing the remaining ones before Sadie could somehow figure out a way to grab those too, Luna followed her to the door. With some tactical bag swinging, the two of them managed to get the door open without putting the bags down and they were soon being dumped rather unceremoniously on the floor as Sadie explained that they might as well leave them there given that Luna would have to lug them back out to take them to her house anyway.

Once the bags had been dealt with, Sadie directed Luna to the large fluffy couch and proceeded to disappear inside the house with the promise of drinks to come. Luna sank into the soft cushions with a sigh that came out a bit louder than she'd intended it to be. Making herself comfortable, she waited as Sadie brought a pair of glasses over, handing one to Luna as she sat down.

"I was going to use a tray, but then I thought, it’s only the two of us, so that would be a waste," began Sadie, probably about to start off on of the many rambles she seemed to be fond of taking off on recently.

"It's fine," said Luna, taking the glass with a whispered thank you. "Like you said, it’s just the two of us."

Sadie smiled. "Yeah. So... now that I'm no longer being a terrible host, why don't we return to that conversation we were having out there?"
Stay Safe
The Princess of Darkness

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KateHardy says...



"That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do," said Luna, nodding along as she took a cautious sip of her drink to get herself psyched up.

"So, you were saying how you were good, but also not great, I think I know what you were getting at there but..." began Sadie. "I mean I don't know if I'm the one you really want to talk about any of this with?"

"Well...didn't I say being here was what made things definitely good," said Luna, "of course you're the one I want to talk about this with. Why do you think I stopped here before I even went home?"

"Right, you did that," said Sadie, sounding almost like she hadn't realized that up to this point. "So. Ms. Taylor, why were you not feeling too great on this heist? I thought you were like crazy about the whole idea?"

"Well Ms. Summers," said Luna, laughing as she tried to say it in some sort of an announcer voice and proceeded to fail miserably," umm, I guess, it kind of sort of came down to who I ended up having to do all this particular heisting with. To some extent of course. Maybe. I don't fully know how to feel about any of that to be completely honest with you."

"Okayyy..." began Sadie, nodding along. "I think I can sort of sense where this is going, but all right, spill your secrets. I want to see what sort of situation you managed to write yourself into this time."

"Huh," asked Luna?

"Just keep telling me Lee, come on, don't stop now. Don't mind the comments I made there, I'll explain to you what that means a little bit later, or I think you'll prolly understand in a minute."

"Ohh...kayy..." said Luna, a little bit uncertain, but deciding that she might as well let the whole thing out right away, she blurted it out. " I umm...kind of felt like I was a tiny bit useless to the whole team, and I feel like maybe I kind of slowed them down more than anything else. Like if I wasn't there, the outcome was probably not going to be any different, and it was probably maybe going to be a little bit faster. And the worst part is, I think the team was trying to be nice about that, but like maybe they didn't really want me there."

"Slow down, sweetie," said Sadie," oh dear. You've gone and dived into that particular hole now."

"The what now?" asked Luna, temporarily dazed by the word that had somehow decided to make its way-out Sadie's mouth. Luna didn't think she'd ever heard Sadie call her that before.

"Lee...I don't know what those people did, and I probably won't. It’s not like I've ever met them and now I don't think I ever will so I can't really speak for them, but I know very well that you are very good at what you do, and you love this whole thing to bits. There is no chance that what you did would slow them down in any way, not to mention there was absolutely no way they pulled the whole thing off without making any sort of meaningful contribution."

"But..." began Luna, thoughts clearing a bit at that declaration by Sadie. She needed to prove exactly why she had been useless. There was no way to suggest that she'd actually been something they couldn't do without, was there?

"No buts, Lee," said Sadie, firmly. "Okay, I know you. You're not going to believe anything without some proper proof, so why don't you tell me what you did, and I can point out how wrong you are to assume that you're help was not going to be needed. Trust me Lee. There is absolutely no way they could've have pulled off your heist successfully if you weren't there."

"You really think that?" asked Luna, genuinely surprised. She probably shouldn't have been that surprised. Sadie was the one who had very specifically talked about her abilities to get her even picked for this whole thing, so of course she was going to believe in her. It still wasn't going to make that any easier to stomach though.

"Yes dinkus," said Sadie. She put her now empty drink down on the coffee table in front of them, moving a little closer to Luna. She, almost hesitantly as if she was afraid Luna was going to run off screaming, brought her arm around, putting it gently across Luna's shoulders in a silent show of support. " Come on. Spill. You have to tell me everything. Don't leave anything out. I'm going to personally point out every single point where they clearly couldn't have done anything without you." As she said that, she proceeded to tap Luna on the shoulder to emphasize each word.

Luna managed another semi goofy smile at that. Her shoulders felt like they were somehow on fire for some reason that definitely couldn't have anything at all to do with the arm currently draped over them. Trying not to think too hard about exactly how nice that felt, especially after the few days she'd had in recent times, Luna took a deep breath and recalled that night as well as she could. She should probably talk about the other moments too, but that could come later. This was the most important part anyway.

And so she began, mentioning how they'd slipped in pretty much like they owned the place because they'd already scouted out the route a bit of time, well most of the route, and so they knew where to go. Sadie was already tapping her on the shoulder. Luna didn't know if that was meant to get her to stop or not, but the movement didn't cause her to go silent pretty fast.

"Soo, before you continue, how did you figure out this route thing?"

Luna proceeded to launch into an explanation involving Dr. Duggar, the tour that they'd gone on and the number of crazy facts that Luna had managed to pick up from all of that. She knew that technically the whole thing was an act, but some of those facts had been a little too interesting so naturally Luna remembered them all and proceeded to spout out everything to Sadie before she stopped at the look on Sadie's face. It was hard to decipher, but something about it gave Luna pause.

"What?" she asked after a few seconds of silence.

"Nothing, you're just ridiculously smart," said Sadie. It wasn't a question. She said it like it was one of those facts that Luna had just rattled off.

Luna could hardly help the redness that immediately spread to her cheeks. "Thanks...sorry I subjected you to all of that, you probably didn't want to hear quite that much detail about that scouting expedition of ours."

"No, that was quite nice to hear, I don't mind at all," said Sadie," but back to my original point. Don't think you can think of dodging around that just quite yet."

"Hmm?" asked Luna.

"So, first point of why Luna is always extremely useful to have on a team, if it weren't for you, how was your team going to know that route?" asked Sadie, eyebrow raised, almost as if she was challenging Luna to refuse her. Unfortunately, Luna did have a pretty good counter point to that one.

"Well, it wasn't me who organized the tour, I'm sure another one of them could've done that," said Luna, quickly.

"Okay, maybe someone else organized it, but I mean they are your teammates, they can't just stand around and have you do absolutely everything. But if it wasn't for your adorable thirst for facts, how would you have ever convinced a professor to give you guys a tour so far into the inside of the place?"

Luna almost choked on her drink at the word adorable. She was nearly done with said drink anyway, maybe she should put it down for her own safety at this point. Trying to think clearly enough to refute the point that Sadie had just made was proving to be a little difficult at the moment and Luna had no idea why any of this was happening. Surely not... Before she could dig herself into a hole by thinking in that direction, Luna tried to argue that point.

"I mean, that other woman was a really good actor, she could've easily pulled it off," said Luna, knowing full well that Dwyn would probably have been too old to pass for a student.
"Really, do you actually believe that?" asked Sadie, almost as if she could read Luna's mind. "Wasn't that woman like thirty something?"

"Not that old, but I see your point, okay maybe I was semi necessary in that one tiny situation," conceded Luna finally.

Sadie smiled wide. She'd only seen that smile before when the girl had gotten a good grade on this one test she'd thought she'd messed up. "Case in point. Now continue. Let's see how many more points we can come up with."

Luna smiled back. There was no way she could resist doing that given how wide Sadie's smile currently was. Shaking her head ever so slightly, Luna dived into the description of how they'd gotten inside using id cards that Dwyn had managed to acquire through some kind of associate of hers. At that, Sadie stopped, although this time it seemed for an entirely different reason.

"I was not expecting something random like that to be part of the game, which sounds almost like an actual heist there," said Sadie, frowning ever so slightly,' either that or that is some rather crazy level accuracy. Was there some sort of other clue that hinted at that somewhere?"

"That is another thing I wanted to talk to you about, some parts of this game were kind of a bit weird," said Luna," I need to run some of the crazier parts by you to make sure I'm not just going crazy."

"Ohh...okay, how about we save that particular topic for just a little bit later then, let's finish this other conversation first," said Sadie.

"I’m not getting out of this am I?" said Luna, trying to sound like she was semi annoyed, but the smile on her face told her otherwise.

"Yes," said Sadie, retuning the smile and patting her shoulder again. "Now, where were we?"

"Keycards," supplied Luna, as she then launched into the description of their journey towards the actual safe. Sadie managed to react at exactly the right moments as Luna engrossed herself in giving a proper play by play of how they'd managed to sneak their way all the way to the room, which Dwyn somehow managed to find.

Sadie once again seemed to frown ever so slightly at that, but she didn't make a comment, so Luna continued on about how they'd begun the search for the actual safe. After a very well-timed gasp from Sadie about the point where they'd discovered the location of the safe, Luna stopped talking knowing exactly where Sadie was going as she quickly glossed over the fact that she'd busted the safe open in record time.

"Don't you try to downplay that," began Sadie immediately sensing what Luna was trying to do before she even did it.

"But....it was just a safe...I mean, how hard..." began Luna, not willing to let Sadie win that one quite so easily. She knew it was a little bit ridiculous that she was trying to win an argument to essentially make herself feel worse, but she decided not to think too deep on that. It just seemed the way to go for the moment, no matter how wrong it was starting to feel the longer Sadie continued to give her the look she was currently giving.

"You were on that team to open all the locks, okay maybe that teammate of yours somehow found some way to bypass quite a few of them, which I am honestly still very suspicious of, but that doesn't mean they'd have been able to figure out how to open that lock," said Sadie.

"But I mean she figured out so much about so many of them, surely she could've figured out some way of getting the safe combination from someone, or maybe she knows how to pick locks too, it’s not like she ever demonstrated a lack of an ability in that department," said Luna.

"Okay, first of all, didn't you say that she specifically asked you to open the safe, which in combination with the fact that you describe here as being someone who'd do the whole thing alone if she had her way would mean that she couldn't at that point get it open. I mean logically if she had a way to do it, wouldn't she have just done it herself, or at least even tried without immediately directing it at you. Besides, come on, they were putting together something of a team, and you were meant to fill in the lock picking slot. They wouldn't be crazy enough to pick two lockpickers on one team."

"Okay maybe you have a point there on her not being able to pick that lock somehow, I'll give you that one, but I mean that doesn't mean she couldn't have obtained that code from some other means. If she got a hold of so many ID cards in like a ridiculously short amount of time, surely that can't be too much harder."

"Lee, you're the smart one, I’m sure you can answer your own question very well here," said Sadie.

"What do you mean?" asked Luna.

"Okay, first of all, a safe that's meant to be that sensitive and important to the place is going to have a lot fewer people actually going inside it as opposed to the hallways you took to get there. You said it was hidden too, right?"

Luna nodded.

"So that means clearly it isn't supposed to be accessible to just anybody. So, by that logic even if she got a hold of keycards that a pretty high percentage of people just in that history department would have access to, it’s a much harder thing to imagine she'd get a hold of a safe combination probably only the proper higher ups of that department have."

"Ok...but that doesn't mean it’s impossible for her to get a hold of," protested Luna. Sadie huffed.

"Luna Lee Taylor, can you seriously not see how it would have been impossible? asked Sadie, making it sound like Luna was somehow missing some particularly important point here.

Luna, now going red for an entirely different reason, shook her head in the negative.

"For someone so smart, you miss some obvious details sometimes," said Sadie, shaking her head. "Well, if you don't see it, I suppose I could just spell it you for you. This...whole thing is a game, right?"

Luna had no idea where Sadie was trying to go with that particular tangent, but she nodded, trusting her friend to get to the point eventually.

"So..they explicitly asked for a lockpicker as well. Are you still with me on this?"

Luna nodded again, now a vague idea of where this particular thread of conversation could be heading forming in here mind.

"And this safe is meant to be basically the big endgame moment of cracking into the big important place and grabbing the large shiny thing," said Sadie, winking as she said the last part.

Luna had no idea why her mouth went ever so slightly dry at that wink, but she nodded again.

"Given that this Dwyn person figured out some way, legal or otherwise to get a hold of a bunch of keycards, does it not mean that the big lock picking challenge therefore is meant to be the safe?

Luna nodded again, cheeks flushing once again as the realization slowly hit her. She was fairly sure a tomato would be pretty jealous of her current color.

"And so there almost definitely was never a combination to be found, at least not unless your teammate somehow cheated the game and got the game designers to reveal it, that's assuming the combination wasn't just randomly spun with no one bothering to actually write it down," said Sadie, tapping Luna on the shoulder again as if she'd just finished presenting her case at court and was slamming down a gavel.

"Fine you win," declared Luna, finally, hiding her face in her hands as a ridiculously silly grin now proceeded to take over her face. Okay, just maybe, despite what Dwyn seemed to indicate a bit too clearly, there was actually some sort of use that Luna had provided to their team.

"Come her you," said Sadie, suddenly throwing her second arm around Luna, and pulling her into an impromptu hug right there on the couch, almost causing Luna to topple straight off the couch and drag Sadie down with her. As it was, they just about managed to balance, Luna moving her head to hide it in Sadie's neck as the girl gently stroked Luna's back.

"Don't be so quick to count yourself out just because of what some random stranger said, okay?" asked Sadie. Luna nodded into Sadie's hair, whispering almost too quiet to hear. "Thank you for that."

Sadie squeezed her just that little bit tighter, whispering back just as softly, almost as if she couldn't afford to speak any louder, lest she break this moment. "Of course. That's what friends are for."

Luna's heart seemed to send up the tiniest signal of protest at the word friend, but Luna definitely was not a point where she needed to be analyzing that particular detail. She settled for pulling her arms around Sadie and squeezing just as tight. They sat there on the couch in each other's arms for a couple more minutes before Sadie finally pulled away, still pressed up against Luna and with hand on her shoulder, but no longer wrapped around her.

Luna proceeded to grab the drinks she'd set down earlier and down the rest of it one final gulp.

"Okay then, " Sadie, said turning to Luna expectantly once again. "Now that we've got that whole thing sorted, why don't we get started on those things you said you wanted to run by me. The little bit that you've told me so far has definitely made me suspicious of the other two at the very least if not this whole game. Let's see if the two of us can't come to some sort of conclusion to put your mind to rest here. I have a little bit of data I can look up from what I know, or I could try and get a hold of the one who delivered the letter although that part of the situation I'm not a hundred percent sure I can control."

"Just listening will be plenty, " Luna assured her.

Sadie nodded, gesturing for Luna to go on.

"Well, the weird parts were mostly towards the end," began Luna," like umm...well let's say you were playing this, and you like actually complete the one single objective, which by the way that's another point I'll get to later that was way too vague, and so when you do that and then actually fly all the way there to deliver the thing you expect to have some sort of acknowledgment of having finished things right?"

"Yeah, I thought they'd throw you like a party or something, I mean given the ridiculous amount of money they're just handing out there...unless umm, they did hand out the money, didn't they?" asked Sadie.

Luna nodded. "Yeah, and before you ask, yes I did in fact remember to double check."

"I wasn't going to ask that," protested Sadie, trying to go for an offended look although it was pretty clear from her tone she was anything but.

"Sure," said Luna," let's go with that. Anyway, so back to things, you expected there to be a party or something right?"

"Yup," asked Sadie, already frowning at what Luna was hinting towards.

"Well, they basically just transferred the money and then kind of left us to find our own way back with like barely any acknowledgment besides said money," said Luna," I mean at first, they even refused to accept that we'd actually successfully pulled the thing off. It was their own game; they should definitely know that. Of course, I assumed that was all part of the whole heist vibe, they did like a suuper amazing job of making that whole part of things feel real. I just kind of hoped they'd drop the act at least at the end. And no chance, it was very real heist like right to the very hand, not even some kind of last-minute congratulation letter or anything."

Sadie squeezed Luna's shoulder ever so gently. "Oh sweetie, no wonder you were so worried about the whole thing. That sounds like a proper mess. Wow, whoever is in charge of customer service in whatever business that is will need to be fired like yesterday. That's terrible. No one is going to want to compete if that's how you're going to get treated at the end of it."

"There is the money," pointed out Luna.

"Well, I suppose there are the kind of people who'd do something like that just for the money, true enough," said Sadie," but still, oh my goodness, I genuinely am suspicious myself. I don't think you're wrong to think that's weird because that most definitely is."

"Yeah, and that's not even the half of it," said Luna.

"Yup, well I'm all ears," said Sadie, "come on, let's see if this company is just really bad or if something much worse went down here."

"That's not possible, is it?" asked Luna, eyes wide.

"Calm down, just tell me everything," said Sadie, patting her shoulder again. "We'll come to a decision at the end of it and do what needs to be done. Don't worry at all."

Luna nodded, doing her best not to freak out too much at the thought that had been roaming around in her head being finally voiced out loud there by Sadie. Saying it loud suddenly made the possibility feel much more real and Luna had no idea how to even begin to react to the things that something like that could entail. It was going to be a right royal mess if that was even fractionally connected to this.

Sadie seemed to sense Luna's thoughts and her other hand was gently taking hold of Luna's own, giving it a squeeze. Comforted by the move, Luna decided that she may as well get the whole thing out now, launching into a description of the whole fiasco surrounding the one and only Mr. Red Shirt or rather Philip Fields or something like that according to what Dwyn had figured out. Luna couldn't remember that name too well, mostly because she'd wanted to forget that whole identity card thing as quickly as possible that time.

"Oh no, this is starting to get more and more suspicious as we go on," said Sadie, before adding at Luna's sudden jump," nothing concrete yet though. I think if nothing else I'm beginning to wonder if maybe this Dwyn woman is a bit more than a regular person participating in a game."

"You know, I might be a tiny bit biased on this matter, because she was a bit uhh.... blunt with how she treated everyone," began Luna," but I actually think that's not the craziest idea you can go with for that woman."

"Wow, if you're calling her blunt," said Sadie, "that's pretty high on the Taylor meanness scale. She must've said some very interesting things. Now I almost want to meet this woman and point a few things out to her."

"Oh, she wasn't that bad," said Luna, trying to dismiss another weird surge of feeling in her stomach at Sadie's declaration. This was really starting to get out of hand. If it wasn't for the fact that Sadie's hand on her shoulder was one of the few things keeping her from totally freaking out at the moment, Luna would've probably excused herself to make sense of these feelings quite some time ago in this particular conversation.

"So, you admit, she was at least a little bad?" said Sadie, jumping on the declaration immediately. "Wow, this woman has to have said some serious things if she's going to show up on that side of your scale."

"Oh, stop it," said Luna, lightly swatting at Sadie. Sadie proceeded to grab said hand and give it a squeeze, completely erasing any sort of retort that Luna had managed to form at Sadie.

"Clearly something is not quite right with that woman," said Sadie," but anyway I'm glad that's all over now and you don't need to worry about it. There's definitely more than one thing there to be pretty suspicious about, no question about that. You're not wrong to be confused about all of this, but I think at this point, the important thing is you're here, it’s done, you won after all, so I think maybe let's try and put that stuff behind us now. Don't let it get you down too much."

"Ok, I'll try that, maybe forgetting all of this and just moving on is the way to go here, getting hung up on all of this is only going to make things worse, and you're right. It’s done. I did win. That is a ridiculous amount of money. I might as well try and move on."

"That's the spirit," said Sadie, "call me anytime, or heck, it’s our holidays, come over anytime, or maybe I'll come over once or twice. Don't try and deal with the rest of this just all on your own, okay?"

"I'll try not to," said Luna, and she did mean it. She hadn't expected talking this through with Sadie to help her as much as it did, and well spending time with Sadie wasn't exactly a chore by any stretch of the imagination.

"Good enough for me. Although I do you want to promise," said Sadie, silently offering Luna a pinkie.

"Didn't you say we were too old for that the last time I tried that?" asked Luna, her tone teasing.

"Yes, but I also know it’s a promise you consider more binding than a legal contract so..." said Sadie, nodding towards the pinkie.

Luna nodded. She tangled her pinkie with Sadie's and the deal was sealed. Once they'd shaken on it, Sadie got up from the couch, pulling Luna up gently with her.

"Come on," said the girl," time for you to get home finally and get some proper rest maybe. I've taken enough of your time for the moment. Your parents are going to love that you made it home earlier than planned. "

"Hmm, I don't know about rest, but this new villager trading hall has been calling my name for a while," said Luna.

"The fact that I understand what that means is horrifying. You play that game wayy too much, but I suppose if that makes you calm, go for it," said Sadie.

Luna nodded. "Something about how there's basically zero expectations but endless possibilities make that game ridiculously relaxing. But I'm not going to try and explain. One either gets Minecraft, or they just don't. It takes a special kind of idiot to appreciate it properly."

"Well, that's my kind of idiot," said Sadie, before she slapped a hand over her mouth almost as if she hadn't meant for that last part to come out. Luna was blushing a bit too hard to process too much into that however as Sadie guided her back towards the front door.

At the door, Sadie helped deposit the bags outside the door once again. Once they were outside, Sadie facepalmed for the second time that day.

"Oh my goodness, this completely slipped by mind, but we didn't figure out a way for you to catch a ride to your parents’ house," said Sadie, "you obviously can't call them if you want to surprise them, and my parents took the car so I can't give you a ride either, umm, lemme call you a cab. I completely forgot about that and here I am pushing you out the door. I'm so sorry."

"Oh, its fine," said Luna," I completely forgot about the transport situation too, and don't worry, our houses are close enough. I can just walk."

"Normally I don't argue with that," said Sadie, "but that is way too far to be walking with this many bags on you Lee. I know you're stronger than you look, but I don't think you should be carrying all of this that far, especially after what must have been a super tiring day if all of those plane rides were also involved. Trust me you're going to regret it if you try and carry all of this over there by yourself. I'll just call a cab, it’s really no trouble."

"Okay, if you insist, I suppose I can handle that. It would be nice not to have to balance all of this. There's just one bag too many for it to be comfortable balancing the lot," conceded Luna.

"And there you have it," said Sadie, already pulling out here phone. A few minutes later the bags had all been quickly loaded into the car that had arrived in about two minutes flat and Luna turned to say goodbye to Sadie. She was about to just wave when Sadie surprised her once again by pulling her into another hug. She had no idea where this slightly more affectionate side of Sadie was coming from, but her brain or body for that matter was definitely not against that particular development as she hugged Sadie back.

"Stay safe," whispered Sadie," and remember, do not keep everything to yourself okay. At least talk to your parents if you feel like you don't want to tell me everything."

Luna just nodded into Sadie's hair, a little too overwhelmed at the sincerity of that to speak at the moment. "Thank you," she finally managed to whisper before she pulled away. Giving Sadie one last wave, Luna slowly got into the car. It didn't take long for it to cover the five-minute drive to her house and soon she was pulling her bags out, ready to head into the house. Once the car had left, Luna wondered briefly why no one had come to greet her yet. Her mother had radar ears and should have come running the moment she'd hear a car pull in. That was definitely odd.

Then she realized she couldn't spot either of her parent's cars in the driveway. Of course. They had absolutely no idea she was coming, so there was no guarantee that they'd actually be home. It was just her luck to arrive at the worst possible time when neither one of them was home on a Saturday of all days. She was going to have to just skip straight ahead to Minecraft just like she'd joked about with Sadie. Shrugging at the realization, Luna trudged up into the house, carrying the bags in one big pile and dumping it all on the doorstep as she searched her wallet for the spare key. She hadn't found a reason to use that thing in ages and she had absolutely zero idea what grand spot she'd selected for its hiding place when she'd last put it away.

After a bit of patient digging, Luna managed to finally uncover the offending item. It took a little bit of fumbling before she managed to properly fit the key in but soon enough, she was staggering inside the house, doing her best no to drop any of the bags as she finally dropped them off just inside the door with one final heave. She was going to have to carry all of that up one by one in a minute, but she was going to start off by locking the door behind her and then sitting there for a second to catch her breath. Sadie helping her earlier had made her completely misjudge how ridiculous it was to lug these things up steps.

After ten minutes of catching her breath, Luna decided that getting the lugging part of the equation of the way would help make the rest of her afternoon a lot more fun if she wasn't going to have to do this later and set about carrying the bags up to her room one by one. It took a little bit longer than it probably should have as she decided to partially get lost in a YouTube rabbit hole for a bit, whiling away the time without even realizing she was doing so, but eventually all her bags were finally in her room and Luna collapsed onto her bed, intent on taking a few more minutes of rest before getting started on Minecraft to wait for her parent's arrival. It had been nearly an hour since Luna had first arrived, so her parents couldn't have been too far off from getting back unless they'd both somehow ended up going really far away, which was very unlikely.

It was with that in mind that Luna eventually settled down in front of her computer, keeping on ear focused downstairs so that she'd heard the noise of a car pulling into the driveway or at least the distinct sound of the front door opening right when it happened. Last thing she needed was to accidentally scare her parents by making them think someone had broken in. Although she wasn't entirely sure what kind of robber would break into a house to play Minecraft at maximum volume.

Her earlier predictions ended up being wildly off. It was nearly four more hours before she finally heard the sound of what she recognized as her mother's car pulling in. She was charging down the stairs before the ignition had even been turned off. Her mother barely had time to look surprised before she was shot down by a blonde-haired missile headed straight for her.

"Some came home early," remarked her mother, once they'd stood there for at least five minutes.

"Yeah," began Luna, already starting to talk her mother's ear off as they made it into the house. Somehow or the other her brain seemed to have made the unconscious decision to keep the somewhat dicier parts of her experience out of her story as Luna began to narrate all the cool things that she could remember seeing. Maybe it was the fact that it had been a cool experience and so even if it didn't fully live up to her expectations, she didn't want any further expeditions to get cut off by accidentally scaring her parents with all of those things.
Maybe she just didn't want to admit everything she'd felt to her parents just quite yet, but either way she ended up almost not mentioning the existence of Dwyn and Conrad as she just gushed about all the setups they'd been to.

It wasn't long before her father also returned, and she resumed all her descriptions in full detail. With that happening and the eventual interrogation she had for her parents on what had kept them out of the house on a Sunday of all days for so long, the heist was all but forgotten about, at least it was until much later in the day, when Luna finally sat in front of her computer, not quite ready to sleep just yet. Her exhaustion had already vanished from her four hours lazing about and playing earlier in the day and right now the thoughts of the heist which had vanished for a pretty solid amount of time were resurfacing once again.

Most specifically that feeling she had that something about this wasn't quite over just yet. It was something that had haunted her quite a bit and in all the rush of her gushing to Sadie earlier, she hadn't remembered to mention that to her either, the girl's words of comfort driving that from her mind for the moment as she started to believe that it was all really over after all. Now however, in the darkness of the night, the house quiet from everyone having gone to sleep, all of those seemed a lot more tangible once again. Given how frequently Luna stayed up at these hours, she wasn't even remotely creeped out by the quiet of the night or the darkness outside, but for the first time in a long time, she felt like she wasn't completely safe here.

Maybe it was the fact that Dwyn had gotten them to visit another hidden room they weren't supposed to. She hadn't seen Dwyn take anything or do anything, but the fact that they'd only explored the one place and then run out so fast meant there was always the possibility. The woman was really, really good at taking things with absolutely no one being aware of it. She honestly wondered if Dwyn herself noticed the things she stole given the ridiculous amount that she had managed to acquire from the person. And that was the ones that Dwyn had shown them. The woman wasn't exactly one to share too much of herself. She did her best to dampen this train of thought, she really needed to forget this and move on, remember the fun moments, and those tiny almost invisible moments of camaraderie that had existed. Despite her best efforts however, her brain's natural talent of picking out the worst possible moments from something was really coming to the fore here and she didn't know what to do. For a second, she thought of calling up Sadie. Talking to her would definitely help and she'd even meant to talk with Sadie about it until she'd gone and forgotten it because of...well that was another train of thought Luna needed to avoid. She'd done a decent enough job avoiding that so far, so she supposed her brain wasn't completely useless when it came to avoiding uncomfortable topics.


Even as she sorted that out however, her brain presented her with several very good reasons why she shouldn't be calling Sadie up at three in the morning. The points had a whole lot to do with the three in the morning part of things. Sure, Sadie had been pretty clear in saying that Luna could call her anytime, but Luna assumed that for non-vampiric humans, three in the morning was not a time that even factored in as a part of a day. There was also the fact that she'd already wasted a couple of hours of Sadie's time not too long ago and she didn't want to just overwhelm Sadie suddenly with problems she didn't deserve to have to deal with. Sadie had only given her the opportunity of a lifetime because she'd wanted it so much. It was an amazing gift and Sadie didn't deserve to be thanked with a bucket load of problems in return.

Once her brain had managed to exhaust that entire list of reasons, she stood there once again, yet again at a bit of a loss on how to move forward with this. Trying to sleep right now was a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, most of them related how there was pretty much no way she'd get anything resembling sleep anytime soon and she did not fancy spending a night tossing and turning in bed. That was far worse than just forgoing sleep all together. She knew that from experience.

The next day was better to start off with. After whiling of a couple more hours with a game or two she'd managed to dismiss those thoughts well enough to catch a little bit of sleep and now in the light of day with things slowly getting back to her normal routine, she was able to almost forget it. It kept coming back to her, but she promised herself that she'd visit Sadie about this in the evening or the next day. She did have a promise after all. That coupled with everything else getting back into the normal swing of things should hopefully be good enough for her to move on from this thing once and for all. It was to this end that found Luna at midday finishing up an assignment she'd nearly forgotten about so that she could go over to Sadie's later in the evening. Her parents were out again, this time at work, and she was up in her room, the house dead silent as it usually was at that time.

It was to this environment that a bell rang out loud and clear, breaking the silence of the house. Luna frowned. It wasn't the most unusual thing to have a visitor at this time, it was almost always a salesperson of some sort. Luna just wasn't a big fan of having to actually talk to a random stranger, not to mention it was going to break her concentration. Well, said concentration was broken anyway, she may as well take care of it. With that in mind, she headed downstairs, moving at a snail's pace hoping whoever it was would just give up and go away.
Stay Safe
The Princess of Darkness

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Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:54 pm
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winterwolf0100 says...



\/Dwyn Souza\/


Dwyn felt free again.

A weight had been lifted off her shoulders-- a grown-man-and-middle-schooler sized weight-- and it felt fantastic. She walked through Chicago with an extra bounce in her step, stealing things left and right and getting spikes of dopamine with every one she pulled off. As she'd exited the airport, she'd broken and thrown away the disposable phone she'd used with Conrad and Luna, and she'd felt like a marionette puppet cutting its strings, finally free to just walk.

As she turned a corner and stole a bracelet, her current purse began to vibrate.

"Lalala, lies! Yeah, tell me that you love me!"

A few people she was passing gave her a strange look and she subtly pulled her arm back where it had been nearing one of their pockets as she fished for the phone.

"Lalala, lies! Look deep into my eyes!"

She pulled the phone out. She knew that most people didn't leave their ringtones on, especially not now, so the weird looks didn't bother her-- not that they ever would've. This one was the only one she didn't keep on vibrate because these were the only calls she never wanted to let go to voicemail. It was the number Derek had, and it was the number her mother had in case her father got worse in the hospital. Her mother wasn't the type of character to reach out after ties had been broken for any reason other than that, which was why she was the one who had Dwyn's number, and Dwyn had made her promise not to give it out. God only knew how her siblings would blow her phone up if they found her number-- all with unpleasant messages Dwyn wanted to avoid.

"Lalala, lies! Say there's no one else above me, I'm the King of Fools--"

Dwyn flipped it open. "Derek?"

"Qué tal?" He said.

"That's Spanish," Dwyn said cheerfully as she "accidentally" bumped into a person and stole their wallet.

"Oh. What do you speak again?"

"Portuguese," Dwyn remarked, "sixth most spoken language in the world. It really isn't that hard to remember."

"Why do you know that statistic off the top of your head?" Derek laughed.

"Because of people like you!" Dwyn said sweetly. "Listen, I know why you're calling, and yes, everything's wrapped up."

"Good. No loose ends?"

Dwyn considered Conrad and Luna. "No, there's a couple."

"Anything that'll trace back to you or me?"

Dwyn thought about that. Neither Conrad nor Luna had enough information to find her even if they wanted to, and she'd stolen something small enough that she doubted the employers would come after her, even if it had been an impulsively stupid thing to do at the moment. "No."

"Good," Derek said.

"And that's all we care about," Dwyn said teasingly.

"That's the game," he remarked. "Doesn't matter if others are caught as long as you aren't. Let's meet up later. We'll go over any final details, and we can discuss how you pay me."

"Pay you?" Dwyn asked absent-mindedly as she walked across a busy street, ignoring cars honking at her and more than a few obscenities thrown her way. "And why would I do that?"

"Because I book the jobs, baby."

"You found a letter addressed to me and then gave it to me."

"Business! Besides, you don't think all those IDs I got you were free, did you? Or that information? I had to pull some strings to get that to happen."

"Well you're not pulling my strings," Dwyn said, even though she really wasn't all that annoyed. She had more money in her bank at this point than she could possibly do anything with besides sending it over to her parents for her dad's medical bills. They refused to take more than they needed on a month-to-month basis, which meant Dwyn was stuck holding onto the money while none of her family spoke to her or acknowledged it.

"Nice to know," he said, his voice cool and amused. "We thinking one million? Two?"

"This sounds more like a face-to-face talk to me, don't you think?" Dwyn smiled, feeling her eyes sparkle. Derek was stupid, but he knew what to do when it came down to it, which meant she admired him enough that she wasn't bothered when he said stupid things.

"Fine, fine," he sighed in agreement. "Meet me for lunch?"

"Eh..." Dwyn thought about it a moment, then said, "I've got stuff to do. Dinner?"

She could almost hear his shrug through the phone. "Good with me."

"Meet me outside Northwestern Medical at, eh... six?" Dwyn contemplated.

"Sure," Derek agreed.

"Lovely. See you when you're richer," Dwyn said.

"I'll be richer when I see you," he countered, then hung up.

Dwyn paused in the middle of the sidewalk, putting the phone back in the purse as she thought through what to do. It had been nearly a month since she last dropped money off for her parents, but her recent encounter with her older brother Kaique had left a sour taste in her mouth, and had further emphasized what she already felt from her two sisters and parents. They said she was still welcome in the family, but what they really meant was she needed to stop what she was doing to be accepted back into the family-- and given how tightknit Brazilian families were, it had stung far more than she'd care to admit.

She knew she wasn't what her parents had wanted. Two older sisters and an older brother, all off to college on full-ride scholarships-- and then there was her, flunking nearly every class in high school and barely managing to graduate. And then her siblings had somehow convinced her to try out college, and she'd failed at that too. The only good thing to come of it had been meeting Derek at a random party, and that had been after she'd already begun slipping back into her teenage habits of having a wandering hand. And when her father had been diagnosed with cancer, it had felt like the final blow. She'd dropped out of college and never looked back, taking on gigs that Derek set up to help cover medical bills-- and then her family had found out, and instead of thanking her, they'd shunned her.

Dwyn felt a spike of rage go through her. Her family-- the only people who managed to make her always feel helplessly trapped by her own emotions. Why should she send them money? They were clearly never grateful for it! The thought had crossed her mind more than a few times, and after completing such a big heist with such a grand reward, it tempted her again. She could be one of the uselessly rich people, living in a place far too big for her and owning twenty luxury cars that she never used. A private library she'd never read from, a private Brazilian chef that she'd likely resent, a thousand TVs to watch all of two channels that regularly showed content in Portuguese.

But then her father crossed her mind-- bald, dark skin, brown eyes with lids that drooped most of the time from tiring treatment and a never-ending hospital stay. And it made Dwyn even more unspeakably angry because she knew she couldn't do it. She couldn't not send the money, not because they needed her or they couldn't pay it without her-- they couldn't, but in her mind that was besides the point. She couldn't not send the money because they were her pressure point. The chisel that shattered her mask into millions of pieces that rained down and sliced apart her body as they fell. They made her innards fall out.

Dwyn clenched her fists at the thought as she started making her way towards the bank. Why should she care for them? Why should she, after their conditional love had cut her out of their lives? Out of her nieces' and nephews' lives, several of whom she'd never even met? Who did Kaique call when he and his wife needed someone to watch his two children-- who did her sister Fabiana call when she needed someone to watch her five? It wasn't Kaique. It wasn't their parents, stuck in a hospital all day. It certainly wasn't Luana, Dwyn's eldest sister-turned-businesswoman who didn't have a spare minute of the day. And it wasn't Dwyn either. Dwyn, the only member of the family who might actually have time to watch their children. To hell with money, Dwyn would do it for free! And they were, what-- hiring a babysitter? It infuriated her. Their culture was built on the foundation of family. And they would rather turn to someone else outside than trust her with their children.

Dwyn opened the bank door more forcefully than she meant to and it slammed closed behind her, causing several people waiting in lines to glance up at her curiously. She tried to pull herself together. An angry woman in a bank would draw attention, and she didn't want to risk that. She forced herself to unclench her fists and slowly take in a deep breath, pushing away the images of young Iracema and Miciela in the restaurant, the complete lack of recognition in their eyes as they'd looked at her. Push away Kaique's all-knowing tone. Push away the anger and resentment building inside her like a volcano. Smiles on, bright eyes-- mask up.

Dwyn walked to the end of the nearest line, embodying the cheerfulness she wanted to convey even as everything inside her was seething. This was a good day. She'd completed a huge heist, an accomplishment within itself, and she'd done it with two people who had no idea what they were doing-- perfection. The ten million dollars? Bonus points. Fireworks should be going off in the sky right now to spell her name, or whatever fake name she'd choose to give them.

She tried to bring about happiness as she waited in line, thinking of everything well that had happened. Her smile did half the work for her. Looking like she was happy was one step closer to feeling it, and by the time she reached the counter, she'd leveled back out to a neutral sort of emotion, and gave a wide smile as she stepped up to talk to the person. "Hi, I'd like to make a withdrawal?"

The woman looked up at her and said, "Alright, I'm going to need all your account information and the amount you'd like to be withdrawing."

As Dwyn listed off the necessary information, her eyes looked around the bank, its grand infrastructure, the large pillars, the cameras everywhere. It would be a fun place to rob if the urge ever arose in her. Even as she thought it she knew she'd never do it. A bank she herself kept money in was far too easily traceable back to her, after all; but still. It was fun to think about.

"And how much money will you be withdrawing from your account, Miss Souza?" The woman asked, clicking at a few things on her computer.

"Nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine," Dwyn said breezily. The woman blinked up at Dwyn.

Dwyn knew that any amount of ten thousand or higher would be reported to federal agencies, and she couldn't pass up the opportunity to be cheeky. She also knew the woman couldn't do anything like refuse her the money, only tell her the standard precautions against spending too much money and how it might affect her credit score and interest rate, about both of which Dwyn cared none. And in the end, she was walking out with just short of ten thousand dollars in cash and out on the street again. She zipped up her purse to make it more difficult for someone to try to steal-- though she doubted anyone would be successful at it considering she'd notice-- and started heading towards the nearest train station.

And on a whim, she was going in the opposite direction of the hospital her father was currently staying in: the direction of home. And all her mind could latch onto was how odd it was that she'd never thought those two things could be so far apart.

~~~
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
  





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Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:55 pm
winterwolf0100 says...



Dwyn unlocked her apartment and walked in, throwing her purse onto the counter and shutting the door behind her. She collapsed onto a chair in her tiny living room space, turning the television on to a station that usually played reruns of Brazilian shows and soccer games. She recognized the match as it flickered on, the old players who had long since retired, the ones she'd fantasized about as a small child, her Brazilian heroes. She'd studied them like characters in a movie, known all the moves they were good at, their names, their numbers. Luana, Dwyn's oldest sister, had been soccer-crazed too, ten years older, a sixteen-year-old cursing at the television in Portuguese when they failed to block the ball or get it in the goal. Dwyn had wanted to play soccer at one point, but that dream had fallen apart fairly quickly after Luana left for college and hardly spoke to her anymore. She'd turned into a businesswoman, of what Dwyn didn't care to know.

The game was the World Cup final, Brazil against Germany. Dwyn had been around six at the time. She couldn't remember most of what happened in the actual game, just the warm feeling about it and how her family had reacted. Most of the season, it had been Luana watching the games with Dwyn, but for the World Cup final, her whole family had watched it together. Her mother had made plates of acarajé and pão de queijo and a whole quindim cake, and they'd all gathered around the television, Dwyn squished between Luana and Kaique, Fabiana on the couch next to their father, their mother passing around napkins. Kaique had taken a bite of his acarajé and mashed beans and the inner filling of coconut and peanut had spilled all over him. Fabiana had kept reaching for the quindim cake only for her hand to be slapped away by their father, who never once took his eyes off the screen. Luana had been cursing at the screen, and their mother was yelling at her not to.

Dwyn had watched the television wide-eyed as the Brazilians made their first goal, then their second, the beautifully executed blocks and exchanges of the ball from feet to other feet. They had all cheered with each successful block, on the edge of their seats, stuffing pão de queijo down their throats by the handful and drinking glasses of lemonade, no one wanting to take their eyes off the screen even to refill their glasses. Luana had kept muttering under her breath the players' names and calling their mothers all sorts of things every time they did something she didn't like, Kaique had moved on to another acarajé and managed to spill even more onto his clothes, and Fabiana almost succeeded in taking a chunk of the quindim before their mother scolded, "Ai, Fabiana!" and she had withdrawn her hand with an embarrassed but sneaky smile.

At the end of the game, Brazil was announced the winner of the World Cup. Green and yellow confetti was shot out of cannons and rained down over the crowd and players. Fabiana had shrieked "Eh, Brasil!", Luana had stood up and had exclaimed at the top of her lungs "Foda-se!", and Kaique had turned and tattled to their parents on Luana's language before trying to pull her legs out from under her, only to miss and manage to squish Dwyn beneath him into the carpet, smearing bean coconut paste all over her face. Dwyn had been staring at the television, wide-eyed, hardly believing, and, in the rush of it all, had begun crying, her six-year-old heart so invested that it overflowed as she watched all her favorite players tackling each other and celebrating, lifting the trophy and shaking it in the air. On the screen, the crowd had begun cheerfully singing the Brazilian anthem, and even when Dwyn was pushed into the carpet under Kaique's body, she remembered sniffling and continuing to cry.

"Eh, Dwyn está chorando," Kaique had said as he pushed himself off her, half-laughing, half-sweet. He wiped away her tears with his hand and used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the insides of the acarajé off her face.

"Ai, que amor," Fabiana had crooned, moving to Dwyn and picking her up. "It is just a game." She swayed her side to side, brushing back her hair, and their mother had announced, "Quindim!"

"Eh, quindim!" Luana had cheered and ran to help their mother cut it and put slices onto plates for everyone. Kaique had yelled, "Quero quindim!" and rushed after, Fabiana following suit with Dwyn still in her arms.

Dwyn blinked the memory away, startled to realize that the game was nearly over on the television in front of her. The echoes of acarajé and pão de queijo sat on her tongue, the taste of quindim barely brushing against her lips. It tasted bitter, salty, wet. Dwyn wiped her eyes and stood suddenly, angrily, turning off the television and marching out of the room towards the bedroom. She was in desperate need of a change of clothes. She hadn't had a chance to change her purse or her wallet in days, and it unsettled her that someone could've been watching her and managed to find her easily through that. Not that she thought someone was, but still... the idea that they could've successfully been doing so was unnerving.

"Eh, Brasil!" echoed in her ears as she tried to force the memory away. It was more difficult than she would've liked it to be, and as she pulled off her pants and tugged on a pair of loud leggings, she stared at the mirror through the open bathroom door. She took in a deep breath, and carefully constructed a happy face. Let it fall apart. An angry one. Watched it crumble. A sad face. Melted it away. She was trembling. She let her breath out slowly through her mouth and turned to find a white tank top. After finding one and pulling it on, she walked all the way into the bathroom.

Something inside her was quivering, a vase in a small earthquake, so close to shattering. She put both her hands on the edge of the countertop, gripping it tightly as she stared into the mirror at herself. Something felt so wrong right now. The entire image of herself was wrong. This was not her. After so many years of switching easily between personalities and names, she wasn't sure she knew who she was anymore. The last memory she had of knowing who she was was when she was with her family, and even then, she hadn't felt like she'd known who she was. But whoever she had been, they had accepted her then. And when she couldn't live up to their expectations of who she was supposed to be, she'd forged a new path for herself, something she was good at, something she felt proud of. Something she could cheer about, yell, "Foda-se!" at the top of her lungs and try to tackle someone in her excitement. And suddenly, she was all alone. It was all wrong.

She closed her eyes and took in another deep breath, then let it out, slowly easing her grip on the counter. She opened her eyes. She didn't want to go to the hospital and face her family. She really didn't. When they didn't want her there anyway, why should they get her money? But it wasn't them getting her money, her siblings who chastised her and her mother who was constantly disappointed. It was her father, who disagreed but wasn't bothered, who had said she was welcome back, no conditions.

She pulled her curly hair back, braiding it slowly and methodically as she stared at her reflection in the mirror. When she was finished, she reached for a rubber band and wound it around her hair, eyes scrutinizing as she took in her own face and features. She would go to the hospital, but for no one but her father. It was his medical bills she was paying, not anyone else's, and she wasn't going to let the others get in-between that. She stood up, feeling slightly more confident as she pieced her personality back together and pulled on a winning smile, watching herself in the mirror. It was convincing enough, even if it was a little sharp. She turned and exited the bathroom.

After grabbing her oversized leather jacket and switching purses to a bright blue one, she was out the door and moving towards the train. And in what seemed like no time at all, she was standing in front of it-- Northwestern Medical Hospital. Dozens of people were streaming in and out of the doors, And suddenly Dwyn felt the overwhelming urge again to turn away, to not go inside. It would be cold and distant, and nothing like the memories the child inside her frantically wanted to run towards. The older siblings who looked after her and taught her English, her mother's cooking, the Portuguese they spoke at home with such ease and laughter, the soccer games, all of that was gone. This was medication advertisements on the televisions, the smell of disinfectant and white, cold walls, her siblings' distanced and disappointed eyes.

She pulled her purse higher on her shoulder and set her shoulders back, putting on a face of steel. She would drop off the money and then leave. It was even possible that none of them would be in the room right now with her father; maybe he would be asleep and she could leave it on the bedside table. She gathered her courage and walked inside, heading straight for the elevator. She knew where his room was from the other times she'd dropped off money, but even still, the inner struggle was just as strong as all the other times she had brought money.

She pressed the three in the elevator and rose up steadily, until ding! She exited the elevator and turned right, walking down the hallway before turning left and freezing. Her father's condition was severe enough that he'd been moved to a room with a glass wall so the nurses could see quickly when anything went wrong. Inside, she could see Luana and Kaique, talking to their mother. Her dad lay with his eyes mostly closed, like he was half-asleep, looking worse than ever. Dwyn felt her breath catch in her throat and she backed up quickly, nearly tripping over her own feet. She couldn't do this.

"Ai!" Someone exclaimed as they turned the corner and Dwyn nearly ran into them. The woman pulled back sharply, trying to balance the container of coffee cups she was holding without spilling any of them. She had frizzy black hair that spilled over her shoulders and a worn-out face and posture, standing a few inches taller than Dwyn, black rectangular glasses framing her face. A colorful patterned dress draped her body, the Brazilian style startling Dwyn out of her thoughts. "Excuse me, I'm so sorry," the woman started, then seemed to really look at Dwyn and squint through tired eyes. "Dwyn?" She said.

"I was just leaving! See you," Dwyn smiled way too cheerfully for it to be real and began to walk around Fabiana back towards the elevator.

"Wait, wait," Fabiana reached out, barely managing not to spill all the coffees as she rushed after her. "Where are you going? Did you already--"

"Pay his bills?" Dwyn interjected. "No, I'll do it when there isn't a goddamn reunion going on in there."

"Ai, language," Fabiana scolded, then closed her eyes briefly, realizing what she’d said. "I'm sorry, that was a reflex, I didn't mean it. Five kids at home."

"I know," Dwyn said coolly, ice seeping into her voice. “Though given my status on seeing them, you’d think I wouldn’t.

Fabiana looked at her, exasperated. "Look, I'm far too tired to have this argument again, but you should go in there." She nodded down the hallway towards the room.

"Maybe I'm tired of you taking my money and still cutting me out," Dwyn said, her tone verging on mocking as she referred to the whole family. "Maybe I'm done giving you anything."

Fabiana grimaced, looking pained. "Dwyn, he's gotten worse. I just— I think you will regret it if you don't go in there."

"Regret? What do you, no, what do any of you know about regret?" Dwyn seethed, feeling her control over her emotions slipping. "You take the money I got doing the things you pushed me away for. You're hypocrites. But you don't seem to regret it. Here, if you want the money so badly, take it yourself," Dwyn said, opening the purse and beginning to shove stacks of money in Fabiana's direction. Fabiana pulled away, carefully balancing the coffee cups as she moved out of Dwyn’s reach, refusing to take it.

"There are things more important than money," Fabiana murmured gently.

"Like family?" Dwyn asked, sickly sweet, and Fabiana squared her shoulders and looked Dwyn in the eye.

"Yes," she said calmly. "Like family." Her dark eyes watched Dwyn calmly, and Dwyn felt like a small child again, scolded by a sister only seven years older than her, her tall bony figure with crossed arms, that half-exasperated half-disappointed smile when she caught her doing something wrong. The talk with all her older siblings, Dwyn fifteen and caught for the first time stealing, all of them home for the holidays and sitting down with her, the seriousness in all of their faces, the disappointment, the sternness. Luana cursing her out over how stupid she was acting, Kaique shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose, staring down at the carpet and refusing to look at her, Fabiana watching her like Dwyn was in a different light, intellectual and serious and scarily calm. And here she was, giving Dwyn that same look, the one she had used when scolding her, talking about how family mattered. “Hypocrite!” Dwyn wanted to scream, “you hypocrite!” They had hurt her so much, and now she had the guts to talk of family?

"You made your love conditional," Dwyn snapped.

Fabiana said tiredly, "You were hurting yourself and we tried to stop you from doing it. And you kept doing it, over, and over, and over again. And you pushed us away when we tried to help you. We had to draw the line somewhere."

Dwyn shook her head. "No you didn't. Family doesn't draw a line. Family puts up with whatever stupid shit you do and they stay by you through it. Family doesn't push you to be perfect just like them, family--"

"Dwyn," Fabiana said softly but firmly. "I don't want to argue with you. I'm exhausted. We're all exhausted. I don't think any of us have the energy for this anymore.” She didn’t have to say what she was referring to—it was clear it was Dwyn. “And he's going to want to see you before..." Fabiana paused and swallowed. "Before he moves on. And we don't know how long that will be anymore. Don't let his last real memories of you be from years ago. Don't let your last memories of him be from years ago. We all love you and care about you, but he's having a harder time staying awake and coherent. If you wait, I don't..." she faltered. "I don't know what kind of conversation you'll get to have."

Dwyn clenched her jaw and watched her, then glanced down the hall. "I'm not going in there with Luana and Kaique or you. I'm not standing next to any of you knowing you would rather trust a stranger around your kids than me." Dwyn held her head high and looked Fabiana in her eyes, returning her calm seriousness. "I'm not."

Fabiana sighed, her eyes sunken from exhaustion as she studied Dwyn, then said tiredly, "Fine. Just realize that you're the one pushing us away, not the other way around."

She turned around and walked down the hallway, her colorful dress swishing around her sandaled feet as she balanced the coffees and slid open the hospital door. A moment later, Dwyn watched as Luana and Kaique followed her outside, grabbing their cups of coffee as they walked around a corner away from the room. After she was certain they were going to stay away, Dwyn walked down the hallway and slid open the door.

The television was muted, playing a rerun of some soap opera, a doctor and nurse yelling and throwing things at each other. Her father watched her through heavily lidded eyes and her mother turned to look at her, even shorter than Dwyn, dressed in a colorful dress in the fashion of Brazil just like Fabiana.

Her mother stared at Dwyn, frowning slightly, and Dwyn couldn't tell if she was hurt or disappointed. Dwyn didn't want to look her in the eye. Her family was the only group of people who could make her feel this way, like she wasn't in control. It came with being the baby of the family she supposed, though that didn’t help her feel better about it.

"O que você está vestindo?" She asked, looking at her outfit critically.

"Mamãe," Dwyn muttered, feeling slightly embarrassed. What was she wearing? She was twenty-six, not ten!

"Você não está se vestindo de brasileiro," her mother said, shaking her head disappointedly—You are not dressing Brazilian.

"Eu sou americano, não brasileiro," Dwyn said sharply. She wasn't dressing Brazilian because she wasn't Brazilian. She had been born in America, and she fully counted herself as American, not Brazilian. Besides, dressing in colorful dresses and thinking of herself as Brazilian always made her feel trapped in the image of what she was supposed to be, who her family expected. She couldn’t think of herself being Brazilian without feeling like that little six-year-old girl, crying as they won the World Cup, the victory so momentously strong that it overwhelmed her senses, the screaming and cheering around her, the safeness of her sister’s arms and beans on her shirt. She hated it. She hated that feeling of safeness, of security—it felt wrong. It felt dependent. Too good to be true. She would not put herself back in that mindset. Not again.

Her mother inhaled sharply like she'd been slapped by Dwyn's words. She shook her head and pointed a finger at Dwyn before saying quietly, aggressively, "Você será sempre brasileiro." You will always be Brazilian. And then she left the room.

Dwyn watched her go, clenching her jaw and purposely pulling up a blank, calm face. Her father muttered from his bed, "Sua mãe simplesmente sente sua falta."

She wanted to turn and shout, "If she misses me, why hasn't she asked me to come back? She has my number!" But she didn't. Instead, she took in a breath and took control of herself. Dwyn slowly sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at him.

"Ouvi dizer que você está ficando pior," she said quietly— I heard you're getting worse. She watched his face to see if it was true.

"Eh, eles são dramáticos," he muttered and Dwyn smiled slightly. They were definitely a dramatic bunch. "Quem disse isso, Kaique?"

Dwyn shook her head. "Fabiana."

"A Fabiana está sem sono e louca," he responded— Fabiana is sleep-deprived and crazy. Dwyn wasn't sure she could disagree. They stayed in a moment of silence, her emotions swimming around inside her uncontrollably. Dwyn didn't feel like she could control this, how she reacted and how she felt right now. But strangely, she didn't feel like she wanted to. With her father, it felt okay to not be completely in control. To just... exist here with him.

"Eu tenho o dinheiro," Dwyn said softly. She had the money. Her father shook his head.

"Ai, dinheiro. Eu não me importo com dinheiro," he said dismissively, waving her away as she pulled money out of her purse and set it on the bedside table. He tried to push it away, but Dwyn calmly set it out of his reach. After trying but failing to reach it, he gave up and pulled his arm back, looking up at the ceiling.

Several seconds of silence passed before he said quietly, "Você sabe que não estou de acordo com o que está fazendo." You know, I don't agree with what you're doing.

"Sei," Dwyn said quietly. She knew. And they fell back into silence, the doctor and nurse on the television now passionately kissing in one of the operating rooms. The machines Dwyn’s father was plugged into continued to chug along, loud and steady, creating music to the rhythm of his life.

"Você sabe que isso não significa que eu não te amo," he murmured— you know that doesn't mean you I don't love you. His voice was weak and breathless and his large hand reached out and held hers gently.

Dwyn felt a surge of emotion rise up inside her, and she whispered, "Sei."

He watched her, then nodded and closed his eyes, letting out a breath. He patted her hand several times and mumbled, "Bom." Good.

Dwyn wiped her eyes with her free hand and squeezed his hand back, staying there for several minutes as she watched him doze before she turned to watch the muted soap opera. They were back to screaming and fighting again. She stayed there for at least half an hour, sitting by him silently, holding his hand. Watching the doctor and nurse alternate between loving and hating each other and all the medication commercials that came on in-between. And finally it was time to leave and go meet Derek, and she couldn't do it. If she walked out that door, they would bombard her with questions and judgment. They would suffocate her.

"Acho que não posso vê-los novamente," she murmured aloud to herself. She didn't think she could see them again. Not now. Not feeling like this. This weak, this unsettled, this off-balanced.

"Então não," he mumbled. Then don't. She glanced back at her father. She had thought he was still asleep. And a lump in her throat rose because she wasn’t sure she could leave his side. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to, and she wasn’t sure she could. He opened his eyes a little bit, looking at her. He looked so worn out. He seemed to understand her hesitation though and squeezed her hand again. He offered a tired, rare, smile. "Você escorrega para fora. Eu os distrairei." You slip out— I'll distract them.

Dwyn watched him for a moment longer, then moved down the bed closer to him and hugged him. "Eu te amo, papai," she whispered, feeling a few tears slip out. He weakly raised his hand and wiped them away.

"Você tem um grande coração," he mumbled, cupping her face with his hand and patting her cheek gently. "Certifique-se de que ele não se quebre." You have such a big heart. Make sure it does not break.

Dwyn took in a slow breath, held it a few seconds, then let it out. Slowly, painfully, she pulled back up the steel wall around her emotions, and whispered, "Aguarde por mim." Hold on for me.

She stood back up as he let out a weak chuckle. "Sem promessas." No promises. Dwyn turned to the door and slipped it open as her father pressed the alarm button on his hospital bed. The several nurses that went his way were enough of a cover for Dwyn to sneak back towards the elevator unnoticed as her family all ran back down the hall from the other direction towards the room. She could barely see her father anymore through the glass from how crowded it was, but she was frozen in her spot, unable to move as she watched him. He made eye contact with her with his sunken, tired eyes, and gave a small nod. She turned the corner and opened the door to the stairway, flying fast down the steps. He was wrong. She did not have a big heart. They were just her weak spot. But still, the pressure on her heart was getting to be too much, and even after a momentous victory with the heist, she felt as if she were about to break.

And suddenly she was outside in the open air, feeling the burning inside her lungs, and she heard someone call from behind her, “Dwyn!”

She turned. It was Luana, grown and professional, a pantsuit even for the hospital, curly black hair pulled into a neat bun on her head, half a foot taller than Dwyn in her heels. Her low voice called out, “He always said he might press that button just to see what happens, but I’ve never been inclined to believe him.”

Dwyn pulled her jacket up over her shoulders and pulled it tightly around her, crossing her arms. “What do you want, Luana?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want anything. I just saw you leaving and…” she shrugged. “I don’t know, I followed.”

“Well you followed me,” Dwyn said shortly. Everything inside her felt like fracturing ice, the surface of a frozen lake about to cave in at the beginnings of spring. “You can leave now.”

“You know I’m in a corporate position now? Over $100,000 a year. I’ve got a million in the bank,” Luana said.

“Beat you to it,” Dwyn said dryly. She could see Derek a few yards away, sitting near the entrance to the hospital, hands stuffed in pockets, sunglasses and expensive shoes and looking right at her.

“Congratulations, you want a trophy?” Luana mocked. “I just say that to say that if the reason you’re doing this is some kind of money thing about feeling like you need to for the bills, you don’t need to anymore. I’ve got it covered.”

“You would like to swoop in and save the day, wouldn’t you?” Dwyn said brightly, sarcastic.

“Sure I would,” Luana said nonchalantly. “You know me, always stealing things from others.”

The comment stabbed into Dwyn, but she put on a stony face and said, “I doubt that.”

Luana straightened her suit jacket and said, “If it’s not about the money, then it’s gotta be some sort of weird attention-seeking thrill you get. And all I’m gonna say is maybe you’d get more attention from us if you talked to us.”

“You think I want your attention?” Dwyn scoffed. “You think your attention means shit to me?”

Luana held her head high and looked straight at Dwyn. “Penso que a nossa atenção significa tudo para.” I think our attention means everything to you.

“Vai apanhar no cú,” Dwyn seethed out the curse. “Your attention means nothing to me. Nothing. You got that?”

“Nothing,” Luana repeated, like she didn’t believe it one bit. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

Dwyn stalked away towards Derek without responding, anger writhing inside her. The pain of seeing her father had been near overwhelming, and then she had had the nerve to say she needed their attention? Well hell to that. They were several years too late, and she didn’t need any of them anymore.

“Let’s go,” Dwyn snapped as she reached Derek, not bothering to stop for him as he stood and casually walked after her.

“And what’s the hurry?”

“There is no hurry. Just ready to leave this place,” Dwyn said without looking at him.

He tilted his head and said, “Uh-huh. And where are we going?”

“I don’t care,” Dwyn said. “Not here.”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop facing him. She gave him a cold, dry look. “What, can’t keep up with your short legs?”

He just looked at her, amused. “Yeah. Come on, I know a place. What’s got you in such a bad mood? You just got the check of a lifetime.”

“I’m fine,” Dwyn said coolly, “now let go of me.”

He paused, then let go of her arm and shook his head, turning forward again to start leading the way towards whatever place he had in mind. “You really are in a bad mood. Was it those people they stuck you with? I didn’t know either of them but figured if they were requested for by name they couldn’t be too bad.”

Dwyn laughed, but it was sharp. “Couldn’t be too bad,” she muttered, thinking of Luna and Conrad at the beginning, barely knowing what they were doing, much less how they were going to do it. “Both of them had never done it before.”

Derek let out a big laugh. “They stuck you with amateurs?” Dwyn made a face of distaste, like she’d eaten something bitter. “Well look at you, training the next generation,” Derek teased.

“We got the job done. That’s all that matters,” Dwyn said shortly, her thoughts still on her father in the hospital room.

He tilted his head. “No, what matters is that we’ve got the money.” He stretched out the word and rubbed his thumb against his pointer and middle finger to emphasize.

“‘We’ is a stretch,” Dwyn said. “You don’t have your money yet.”

“Glad you brought it up!” Derek said. “Didn’t want to seem impolite and do it myself.” He turned a corner and pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head, revealing his light brown eyes as he opened a door and stood to the side to let Dwyn step in. It let out a cheerful chime. “Ladies first.”

“Too kind,” Dwyn said sarcastically, walking in. It was the kind of restaurant where you ordered at the front and they brought it to you, and as Dwyn got in line, she said, “Lean down.”

Derek raised an eyebrow but obliged and Dwyn grabbed his sunglasses off the top of his head and put them on hers. “Good.”

“I’m going to expect you to pay for those,” he pointed out as she stepped up to the counter.

“Right, and I’ll definitely do that,” she reassured him in a sweet voice before turning to the person behind the counter and placing her order. Derek stepped up beside her before she could pay and she said, “I’m not paying for you you know, I did that last time.”

He ordered anyway, and then handed his card over to the woman behind the counter and said, “That’s why I’m paying.”

She looked forward and fumed slightly inside as she filled her cup with water, still annoyed from Luana saying she needed them. It had spread by now in her mind to her needing anybody, and the idea that she needed someone to cover the cost of a burrito after she’d been paid ten million dollars was ridiculous.

“I can pay for my own food,” she said, more aggressively than she intended. Her emotional wall was near destroyed for the day and she hadn’t had a chance to rebuild it, so she was a lot less aloof than she usually tried to be.

Derek looked at her incredulously, and said in a slow voice like he was speaking to a child, “I’m aware.” He grabbed his cup off the counter and moved to fill it up. Dwyn grabbed her own now full cup and moved to a corner table of the restaurant, where she could see the front door and the entrance to the kitchen at the same time. After a moment, he joined her, putting their number card up on the table so the staff could see it.

“So except the two amateurs, everything went fine?” He asked, taking a sip of whatever soda he’d gotten.

“That’s a big ‘except’, but yes, none of us ended up dying or arrested, so I would consider that as things ‘going fine’.”

“Touché,” he said.

“Wow, you know a word that isn’t in English,” Dwyn said with sarcastic cheerfulness.

“Actually, I know more than one,” he said, as if that were something he was extremely proud of himself for. His posture bordered cocky as he leaned forward and said, “I’m a multilinguist of sorts myself.”

She looked at him flatly. “That’s not a word, though I will say it’s a surprisingly intelligent made-up one.”

He tilted his head. “Well, I try.”

A teenager brought their plates over and set them down, being instructed by an older worker. First day, probably. They walked away and Dwyn picked up her burrito and took a large bite, watching rice and beans spill out and onto the plate. It made her think of acarajé and Kaique’s stained shirt.

“One of the people I was with was barely out of high school,” Dwyn said. “Gave her real name and had no clue what she was doing the entire time. Could pick a lock like a demon though.”

Derek laughed and shook his head, taking a bite of his own burrito. “Kids really are crazy. We were too once, probably.”

“I doubt that,” Dwyn said coolly, though a small smile edged onto her face. She remembered the party where she’d met him, tried to take his watch, and he had called her out on it. She hadn’t been as good then as she was now, but she had been good enough for being caught to not be normal. And instead of calling the police on her, he’d taken his watch back calmly and offered to get her a drink.

“Oh, we definitely were,” he said. “So—do I get to ask why you were at the hospital?”

Dwyn stiffened up slightly and said, “No, you don’t.”

Derek sighed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He took another bite of his burrito, then said after he’d swallowed, cool and calm, “how about we settle on 1.5 then and call it a done deal?”

Dwyn blinked, in the middle of a bite as she watched him, her eyes narrowing, trying to decide what he was playing at. “You’re asking for a lower pay?”

He shrugged and said breezily, “You make me more money than I know what to do with.”

She studied him for several more seconds, then said, “Fine. 1.5.”

He nodded and said, “Good. You can buy a famous pair of shoes or something then give them to me and I’ll sell them off.”

“I’ll send them your way.” They ate their burritos quietly, Dwyn’s mind still distracted and at the end of its rope as she considered both her sisters’ words. They made her angry, frustrated, out of control, and before she knew it, she’d passed the rest of dinner in quiet, Derek watching her quietly as he ate his own burrito.

“Why are you watching me?” She said critically.

“You’re acting different,” he said calmly.

“I always act different,” she said nonchalantly. “That’s my game.”

Derek raised an eyebrow like he didn’t quite believe her, but he said, “Sure. But you don’t act different around me.”

“I act different around everybody. You just don’t see it because you don’t see me around other people,” Dwyn said. “You’re naïve if you think you really know anything about me.”

He studied her, clearly thinking about something, though she couldn’t tell what. Finally, he stood and said, “Alright. I think that wraps things up for tonight, don’t you?” He held out a hand for a second, she wondered if he was offering his hand to pull her to her feet, which might be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Then, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Sunglasses?”

She pulled them off her head and put them in his hand, eyes icing over as he put them over his eyes, hiding them from view. “I’ll let you know when I get anything new for you,” he said. “Have a naïve night, Dwyn.” He pushed his chair in and turned to leave, then paused and said, “You know you don’t know anything about me either, right?” It wasn’t really a question, but she answered anyway.

“Maybe.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment and pushed the door open, walking outside and out of view. Dwyn stayed for a few minutes, staring at nothing in particular and everything at once. Finally, she stood and left, heading towards the nearest train station and going to her apartment.

She glanced at the clock—just past 7:30. She didn’t care. Maybe it was the long plane ride, or the emotional roller-coaster that the day had turned out to be. She was exhausted. She made sure she had everything packed in her purse, then set it down next to her bed and collapsed onto it.

~~~
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
  





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Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:55 pm
winterwolf0100 says...



A loud banging startled Dwyn awake, and she looked at the clock next to her bed. Two a.m. What the hell? Disoriented, she quickly got out of bed. She’d been too tired to take any of her clothes off, and she slipped her shoes on quickly and grabbed her purse from the floor, rushing to grab anything that could point to anything personal about her. She shoved them into her purse quickly, then grabbed a second purse, the one she kept all her family’s information and extra IDs inside. As she ran into the hallway, the banging on the loud door turned into the sound of wood splintering. Her heart pounded in her chest as she backed away from the door, towards the living room. Without taking her eyes off the front door, she slipped open the window next to the television and backed out of it slowly, glancing down to make sure nobody was on the ground several floors below looking up at her. Her feet planted on the fire escape and she slid the window closed, ducking down and out of sight as the sound of the door breaking to pieces from inside resounded. Without a moment’s hesitation, gunshots rang out, random and incoherent, as if they weren’t even aiming, just trying to get the job done.

Dwyn covered her mouth with her hand, trying to hold in the emotion wracking through her. No noise. They would hear her. With the gunshots, they couldn’t be professionals, so it must be some random kids getting up to trouble. She was familiar with that, she could handle that. She had more money than she knew what to do with anyway, it didn’t matter if they took anything inside there. She realized she was trembling and tightened her grip on the fire escape, beginning to climb quickly down the ladder. She lived on the fifth floor—why would they go to the trouble of going that far when it would’ve been far easier to rob someone on the first floor?

She jumped the remaining distance and as soon as her feet touched the ground, she took off running, rounding a corner as fast as she possibly could and only slowing once she was at least a block away. This was Chicago at two in the morning. It wasn’t safe for her to be bolting around, with two purses no less. She raised her hand to her mouth again, feeling another round of fear ripple through her as she briefly closed her eyes, trying to catch her breath. “You are better than this,” she wanted to yell at herself. “Get control of yourself!” But still she struggled not to break down.

She probably had enough cash to go to some random motel for the night, but she didn’t know any off the top of her head in her panicked state. She couldn’t call the police, she’d worked hard to make sure they didn’t have her real address and she wasn’t about to give that up because of something as small as—as small as—someone had tried to kill her. She swallowed back a cry. She was so tired and disoriented. She would never be able to make it very far like this.

She pulled her phone out, hands trembling. She’d never done this before—you didn’t give your address out. You didn’t tell anyone where you lived. No one knew, no weaknesses, you couldn’t give anyone any leverage over you. So why would someone do that for her? But she did it anyway. She flipped open her phone and moved to the first contact, then pressed call.

It rang for several seconds, before he answered and said groggily, “Dwyn? What the hell?”

“Derek,” she whispered. She had been woken up in the middle of the night to someone breaking in; she didn’t have any control over her emotions. No walls, no barriers. “Derek, I need your help.” Her voice slipped as a few tears leaked from her eyes. She could hear him shift in his bed.

“What?” His voice was rough and deeper than normal from sleep. “What happened?”

“I need somewhere to go, I can’t—I don’t know what to do—” She began to cry.

“Alright, calm down, slow down,” Derek said calmly. “What happened, where are you?”

“I woke up and someone was breaking in, I, I got out the window and heard gunshots, they were shooting the place up, I—” Dwyn tried to hold in a hiccup. “I don’t know where to go.”

He was silent for several seconds, then said, “Go back to the restaurant.”

“It’s two in the morning,” Dwyn said, tears rolling down her cheeks that she was desperately trying to stop. She kept wiping at her eyes and more kept coming out. “They’re not going to be open.”

“You get stupid when you’re tired,” Derek said amusedly through a yawn. “Go to the restaurant and I’ll come meet you, okay? Try to take a few deep breaths, slow your heart down.”

Dwyn tried to listen to him and said, “Okay, I… okay.”

“Alright, good,” he said soothingly. “Deep breaths. Do you need to stay on the phone?”

Some part of Dwyn’s brain knew this was wrong, this was too comfortable, too safe to be with Derek, it wasn’t good for either of their business, they were going to end up endangering each other. But it was a soft voice in the back of her mind, and her tired brain was latching onto his genuine care and concern and holding on for dear life. “No, I can get there,” she murmured hazily. Her tears had slowed

“Okay,” he said carefully. “I’m on my way, alright? I’ll pick you up from there.”

She didn’t respond, just started moving slowly out of her frozen state. “Dwyn? You hear me? I’m on my way,” he repeated.

“Bem,” she muttered numbly.

He hesitated, then said, “Okay, I’m going to take that as a yes, alright? I’ll be there in a few minutes, I might make it there faster there than you. Okay, I’m gonna hang up, alright? That okay?”

Dwyn pulled the phone away from her ear and pressed the ‘end call’ button, flipping it closed and slipping it back into the blue purse, trying to regain control of her emotions even though she felt completely out of it. She made her way to the train station before realizing the train she needed to take likely wasn’t running yet. She reminded herself again that it was two in the morning. She started walking instead. After around twenty minutes of walking and still not being anywhere close, she heard her purse begin to play, “Queen of Lies” and she grabbed her phone and pulled it out, flipping it open.

“You alright?” Derek asked. “I’ve been sitting here fifteen minutes.”

“The train isn’t running,” Dwyn said.

“Damn, if I had known you were taking the train I would’ve just come to you. I didn’t want to come near your house if you didn’t want me there. Where are you?”

She looked at the nearest street signs and told him. Before long, he was there, his car pulling over onto the side of the road, passenger window rolled down. It was a nice car, expensive, but Dwyn couldn’t focus on any of that. She felt so numb, like since she hadn’t been able to control her emotions, her body had shut them down again. She was still trembling though.

“Hop in,” Derek said through the window. Dwyn hesitated, then opened the door and climbed in. The door barely made a noise as she pulled it closed and pulled her seatbelt across her chest. She wasn’t worried about riding without it, but the beeping annoyed her. She held her purses to her chest and stared at the road.

“I’m sorry for calling you, I shouldn’t have,” Dwyn murmured. “It was extremely unprofessional of me. You can just drop me off at a motel.”

He glanced at her as the car started to move forward, and he said, “Are you kidding? I’m glad you called. My night was boring anyway.”

They drove in silence for a while, and after passing several motels and hotels, Dwyn said, “I said you can drop me off.”

“I can,” he agreed, even as he passed more. “It just seems easier to take you home.”

Dwyn glanced at him. “You’re the one who told me not to give my address out to anyone. It’s dangerous.”

“Eh, I trust you,” he said, stifling another yawn. “Besides, I’d rather you not die. You make me a lot of money, remember?”

She laid her forehead against the window as she stared out at the dark streets. “That the only reason?”

“If you want it to be.”

She glanced back at him. “You know I’m asexual right? I’m not gonna—”

“Not expecting you to,” he said nonchalantly. “And I wouldn’t ask even if you weren’t. Besides, sex is overrated. Especially when the other person is currently traumatized from having their house broken into.”

Dwyn chuckled dryly, then fell silent again as she stared out the window. She could see him glance at her a few times out of the corner of her eye, but he didn’t say anything else. Before long, they were pulling into a parking garage for some extremely expensive condos and he was turning the car off.

“Come on,” he said, stepping out of the car and moving around to open her door. “Ladies first,” he said jokingly, his voice still gruff from being asleep.

Dwyn stepped out and grabbed her two purses, following him to the elevator and watching it rise until they got to the fourteenth floor and it came to a stop. The doors opened to a hallway with exactly two doors: one across from the elevators and one next to the elevators labeled as the stairs. “You have the entire floor to yourself?” Dwyn asked, frowning a little as he unlocked the door and walked in.

“I’m guessing from your face you don’t?” Derek asked. “Here, you can set your stuff down.”

Dwyn wouldn’t usually have parted with her things so easily, but now, she slowly set both purses down on the ground. She walked further into the room as he moved to close the front door.

“So, two purses,” he noted, standing over them.

“All my personal information,” she said, glancing down at the purses and then making eye contact with him. He was closer to them than she was now. He could learn anything about her he wanted to, at least anything she had on paper. But he didn’t seem even slightly tempted by her statement.

“Smart,” he said. “Keep it in something that’s easy to escape with.” He moved past her and sat down on a couch. She noticed now that he wasn’t wearing something extremely expensive, just a simple t-shirt and sweatpants. It occurred to her for the first time that maybe he changed his appearance for different people the way she did. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that—the idea that she really didn’t know anything about him. That he really didn’t know anything about her. That nobody really knew anything about her. It should’ve made her feel safe, but after having woken up to someone breaking in, it scared her. Nobody knew where she lived. If she had been killed or taken somewhere, who would’ve noticed? Who would’ve known to look for her?

“Want to sit?” He asked, gesturing to the empty spot on the couch next to him. Slowly, she sat down. This felt so different—no walls up. It felt wrong, but it also felt right. And she realized she didn’t want Derek to not know her. She wanted him to know about her. She didn’t want to just disappear and have no one be worried about her. And suddenly something inside her had cracked and she was crying again, full-on sobbing.

He watched her, frowning, not judging, just concerned. He waited for her to speak though, and eventually, she whispered, “My papai—he has cancer. That’s why I was at the hospital. I—I’m not on good terms with my family, but it’s not looking good, and I’ve been paying the bills, and so I went to drop off some money and he—” she closed her eyes as she choked on a sob. “He’s not doing well.”

Derek seemed to consider that for a moment, then said softly, “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “I’m not supposed to be like this. It’s easier if I can push my emotions down, if I can just—when I let my emotions out I get out of control, if I can just build a wall and project whatever I want then I can be whoever I want to be. I’m happy all the time, I’m sarcastic and witty and people don’t like me but I don’t care about it. And I don’t—I really don’t. I don’t care if people don’t like me. But I do care about the image I show and I can’t control that if I’m like this, I just— I don’t want him to go. I want him to stay,” she sobbed, falling silent as her body wracked with her crying. She couldn’t talk anymore, too choked up on her emotions. She closed her eyes and rested her face in her hands, leaning forward onto her knees.

After a minute of silence, she felt Derek slowly and silently put his arm over her shoulders. A silent gesture that he was there. He wasn’t leaving. The vulnerability of it all felt so foreign to her, but it didn’t feel like he was treating her like a small child, the way it felt when her family did it. It just felt like he was… there. In a few minutes, her crying had slowed.

“You said you heard shots?” Derek asked quietly. Dwyn nodded and took in a deep breath, hiccupping the way she did after she’d cried hard.

“They broke down the door and just—started shooting.” She wiped her hand over her face and Derek handed her a tissue.

“And what floor do you live on?”

“The fifth,” she whispered. “It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know why someone would go to that much trouble to get into my apartment. They were banging on the door trying to break it down. I don’t live in a nice place either, it’s not the type of place you’d choose to break into. Not to get anything out of.”

“Is there any way someone could have figured out where you live? One of the amateurs?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, trying not to collapse under the weight of her emotion. “They wouldn’t be capable of it. And I didn’t even tell them my full name, so even if they—” she froze, the gears in her mind moving quickly.

“What?”

“Red Shirt,” she whispered. “Merda, it’s Philip Fields. It’s the people who hired me. He introduced me to everyone by my full name before I got a chance to give a fake name, he knew my full name.”

“Is there any way your current address would be attached to your name in any way?” Derek asked.

“No, I’ve kept everything under the table,” she murmured. “I don’t know how he could’ve…” But there was no denying it. It was definitely him. It had to be. “He hired people to kill me,” she said quietly, her anger beginning to build. “He sent people to kill me, that twisted, back-stabbing, skinny, ugly, Tom-Cruise-wannabe—”

“The guy who employed you did this?” Derek asked, anger tinging the edge of his voice.

“He had to. He’s the only person who could’ve.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t one of the people you worked with?” He asked.

“No,” Dwyn said dismissively. “They’re stupidly loyal, they wouldn’t do that.”

“Well I hate to say it, but if they’re stupidly loyal, then they’re probably the next targets,” he pointed out. Dwyn stiffened. Why did that make her anxious? She didn’t care about them. It must’ve been the principle of the whole thing—hiring someone to do a job for you, then killing them after they completed it. Back-stabbing. Traitorous. That was why she felt so angry over the idea, not because she actually cared about Luna or Conrad specifically. She’d have this reaction if it were anybody she’d worked with.

“Do you know how to find either of them?” Derek asked, bringing her slightly back down to earth.

“I don’t know, I…” she paused. “One of them told me where he works. A day job, nine to five.”

“Alright,” Derek said calmly, “then that’s where we’ll start. I’ll take you there tomorrow morning and you can tell him to stay careful. See if he knows where the girl is.”

Dwyn nodded half-consciously. “Yeah. Okay.”

“For now, it’s—” he paused to look at his phone. “Three in the morning. So we should both get some sleep. I don’t have a guest bedroom, but you’re welcome to crash on the couch.”

“You have a whole floor and you don’t have a guest bedroom,” she muttered, but her eyelids were already growing heavy.

“What can I say,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “I’m the artificial kind of wealthy.” He grabbed a blanket and handed it to her.

Dwyn laid down on the couch, moving one of the decorative pillows to use as a regular pillow and pulling the blanket over herself. “I never pictured you as someone who owns decorative pillows,” she mumbled.

“Really?” He said, raising an eyebrow. Surprise tinged the edge of his voice. “I wear shoes that cost ten grand and you’re surprised that I own decorative pillows?”

Dwyn smiled a little, already falling asleep. “Actually, I’m not surprised at all.”

Derek chuckled. “Goodnight Dwyn.”

But she was already asleep.

~~~
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
  





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33 Reviews



Gender: Genderfluid
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Reviews: 33
Sun Jun 19, 2022 6:56 pm
winterwolf0100 says...



Dwyn woke groggily, not remembering what happened. She was somewhere she’d never been before, and it took her a moment to realize where that was. The smell of coffee filled the room and before long Derek walked into the room and said, “I was wondering when you’d wake up.”

He sat down in a chair next to the couch. “Coffee?” He set a cup on the table in front of her. “Wasn’t sure how you like yours so it’s just black right now.”

Dwyn picked it up and began to drink it, though she slowed when she realized how hot it still was, burning her insides as it went down. Derek made a face of disgust. “You drink your coffee black?”

She looked over at him and stifled a yawn. “Clearly. What time is it?”

“A little past ten,” Derek said, taking a sip of his own coffee.

Dwyn grimaced and took another long drink of coffee, trying to remember exactly what had happened and how she’d gotten here. It didn’t feel alarming, so she knew she’d come here for a good reason, but… it hit her and she nearly choked on her coffee. “Wait, it’s past ten?”

He glanced up at her as she stood suddenly. “Yeah. You alright?”

“His office opens at nine, they could already be there to kill him,” Dwyn said, setting the coffee cup down on the table and pulling on her shoes.

Derek watched her with interest. “Didn’t realize you cared enough to wake up an hour earlier. Is something…” It was clear what he was implying and she shot him an annoyed look.

“No, something is not. He’s thick-headed and far too tall.”

“How tall?” Derek asked.

“At least six feet.”

“That’s not that tall. I’m six foot.”

Dwyn smirked. “You wish.”

Derek grimaced, like he was too tired to argue as he took another sip of his coffee. “I do.”

Dwyn shook her head. “Alright come on, we’re going.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We are?”

“Or I can steal your car,” Dwyn offered, and he shook his head.

“Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his keys and walking to the front door. Dwyn grabbed both of her purses and followed him out the door as he pulled it closed behind him and locked it. As they waited for the elevator, they both sipped their coffee.

“This coffee is actually good,” Dwyn acknowledged. He glanced at her and smiled slightly.

“Well, I try.” He turned to the elevator again as it opened and they stepped in. Soon enough, they were in his car—which Dwyn now saw in the light was a Lamborghini— and on their way towards the museum, Dwyn giving him directions. Finally, they were close enough that he connected the dots and said, “He works for the museum? Why’d I have to get you those employee cards then?”

“Because he’s stupid and you love me,” Dwyn said dryly as she finished off her coffee.

“Interesting perspective,” he muttered as he pulled over for her to climb out. “Let me know when you’re done, I’ll pick you up. We can figure out what to do about your apartment.”

Dwyn leaned against the passenger window as she looked at him. “Sure.” She watched him, taking him in seriously for the first time in a long time. He watched her in return, making eye contact for a long moment. Dwyn broke eye contact first, looking over at the building across the street where Conrad had said he worked as an accountant.

“So…” Derek said, and she looked back at him. “Are you the type of asexual person who still makes out with people, or—”

Dwyn rolled her eyes and began to walk away.

“That’s not really an answer!” He called after her, then let out a laugh and drove away. She watched his car disappear, then began to make her way across the street towards the building.

When she entered, the air conditioning blasted her and she nearly froze to death. The woman at the front desk looked up at her and seemed to do a double-take at her two purses. “Can I help you?”

Dwyn put on a bright smile and said, “Hello! I’m looking for Conrad? He’s an accountant.”

The woman studied her for a few more seconds, then stood and said, “I’m not sure I recognize the name, but I would be happy to take you to the accounting department.

Dwyn smiled. “That would be great, thank you.”

The woman nodded and Dwyn followed her as she moved away towards an elevator. They rode up in silence until it opened to a floor of tiny, cramped office cubicles and the sound of typing. The woman walked to a cubicle and said, “Lisa, do we have someone named Conrad working here?”

The woman in question annoyedly pulled her earbuds out and said, “Excuse me?”

“Conrad?” The secretary repeated.

The woman looked over at Dwyn in distaste. “You’re here for him?”

Dwyn smiled and swallowed the urge to snap at the woman. “Yes, I am.”

“Well, you’ll have to go somewhere else for him,” she said smugly. “He up and left a few days ago, no word, just got a replacement sent. Work was too hard for him I guess.”

Dwyn, however dumb she thought Conrad could be, still felt anger at the way this woman was talking about him, though she wasn’t sure why. Conrad was plenty smart enough to complete his accounting work; otherwise, he never would’ve worked there. Besides, Dwyn had seen his tax paperwork, and it was all perfect—at least, it seemed to be. She hadn’t paid taxes in a very long time so she wasn’t actually sure.

“Do you know where he might’ve gone?” Dwyn asked.

“You’d know more than I would. And if you had some sort of a one-night stand with that man, I wouldn’t go looking too hard unless you’re pregnant,” the woman said with an annoyed and slightly disgusted look on her face.

Dwyn stood stunned, but slowly mustered a cold smile. “Thanks for the advice,” she said in a sickly-sweet voice, then turned and walked back to the elevator, the secretary following her quickly.

“I’m so sorry for her,” she said, her face flushed pink. “She’s very… forward.”

“Forward,” Dwyn repeated, then got off the elevator and made for the door without another word. She had to come up with some new way of reaching him then. She paused. Luna had his business card—but Dwyn didn’t have a way to reach Luna either. Still… She considered everything she knew about Luna. Nineteen, not from Chicago but clearly near enough to have reached Chicago on her own. Named Luna Taylor—she’d learned that when she’d stolen her driver’s license before slipping it back. White, blonde hair, shorter than her. And since she had a driver’s license, she should be able to find her relatively easily. Well, not her, but she knew someone who could.

She called him. “Hey Derek,” she said when he picked up the phone, “I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”

“Well that was quick,” he said calmly. “Turn around.”

She turned and there he was in his car, hazards on as he made eye contact with her even through his dark sunglasses. She could see his eyebrows raise up. “Well? You coming?”

She hurried across the street and opened the passenger door, sliding in.

“What’s up?” He asked without looking at her, beginning to drive and setting his phone down as she flipped her phone shut and disconnected the call.

“He doesn’t work there anymore. I don’t know enough about him to find him, but the girl has his business card. I know her first and last name, physical appearance, age. I know she doesn’t live in Chicago but she’s got to be within the distance of a train ride because she didn’t drive a car and her first time on a plane was when we were dropping off the package.”

He glanced at her. “What’s her name?”

“Luna Taylor.”

He flashed a cocky smile and looked back at the road. “I can find her.”

Dwyn gave him a small, real smile in return. “Great. Then let’s do this.”

~~~


After several hours on a train to Iowa and a forty-five-minute drive from the station to Des Moines, Dwyn was in front of a generic suburban cookie-cutter house and ringing the doorbell.

She was still holding her two purses and had her arms crossed across her chest as she waited for Luna to open the door. It occurred to her that she might still live with her parents. Would they be here and answer the door instead? But after several moments she heard Luna’s soft voice say, “Hi, umm, we aren’t interested in buying anything today, so—” as she started to open the door, then paused as she saw Dwyn. “Oh, uh, umm… Dwyn,” she said weakly.

“What’s up, middle schooler,” Dwyn said, moving forward and pushing her way inside. “You got a backpack in here somewhere? Where’s your room?”

Luna pointed wordlessly up the stairs and Dwyn started making her way. “Uh, wait, what’re you—what’s going on?” Luna asked, confused. “I thought you said—”

“That you’d never see me again?” Dwyn cut in. “Yeah, I assumed you wouldn’t. Des Moines, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed it on my own, but you definitely give off Iowa energy.”

“I…” Luna paused, blinking a few times. “I do?”

“Definitely. Like that thing you do where you aren’t sure what’s happening and you just stand there gaping like a fish. Yeah, like that,” she said as Luna started to do it. “This your room?”

She opened a door and said, “Nope,” before closing it and going to open another. “Oh, this is definitely your room.” She walked inside. It was so minimalist that it might’ve looked like a purposeful decision except for the random collections of books in various places in the room, Lego boxes and figurines, and several Minecraft characters set up on a desk with a laptop. “Wow, you really don’t like making decisions, do you? You got in your room and you just… left it empty.”

Luna flushed. “It’s not empty,” she said, trying to stand up for herself. “I have things—”

“The walls are white and you have nothing on them,” Dwyn pointed out with a tone nearing pity. “it looks like a room in a mental hospital for patients who get stressed out easily.”

Luna glanced around her room and said with a hint of despair, “No it doesn’t,” but it sounded like she was beginning to question herself.

“It’s alright,” Dwyn said soothingly, still looking around. “You’ve got loads of posters, you’re just worried about putting them up crooked and not being able to change them aren’t you?”

Luna turned so red that Dwyn would’ve mistaken her for a tomato. “I’ll take that as a yes. Now where’s a backpack?”

Luna blinked and did the fish face for a moment before she walked over to her closet and opened it, pulling out a backpack. “You didn’t say why you’re here?”

Dwyn glanced at her as she sat down on the bed and put her purses beside her before beginning to transfer everything from them into the backpack. “Oh.” She looked up at her and said coolly, “Someone broke into my apartment and tried to kill me. Red Shirt sent them, which means they’re probably after all of us. I came to warn you.”

Luna blinked a few times, mouth open as her brain tried to process that. “What?” She whispered.

“You still have Conrad’s business card? He isn’t working in the same building anymore according to the woman I talked to.”

Luna wordlessly nodded, moving to go grab it. She paused and said, “Wait, I’m sorry, I’m still caught on the ‘tried to kill you’ thing. Did they… I mean, they…”

“They broke down my door,” Dwyn said slowly, “and started shooting.”

Luna’s face seemed to have gone a shade paler than it normally was, which was already extraordinarily pale. “And you think that they’re going to come after me too?”

“I would imagine since they didn’t get me they would, at the very least to see if you knew where I was.”

Luna watched her wide-eyed. “So what do I… what do I do?”

Dwyn glanced at her then rolled her eyes. “Well I wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t going to come with me. We’re going to find Conrad and figure out what to do from there.”

“You know,” Luna said slowly, with a small nervous smile, “if I didn’t know better, I might think you cared about me.”

Dwyn glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “If you didn’t know better.”

Luna squared her shoulders, seeming to have a brave moment. “Yeah,” she said more confidently.

Dwyn chuckled and said, “You’re funny. Now where’s the business card?”

Luna handed it to her. “It says you have to schedule an appointment to talk to him in person.”

Dwyn looked at the card and grinned as the idea formed in her head. “Well then middle schooler—looks like we’re getting an accounting consultation.”
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
  





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KateHardy says...



\/Luna Lee Taylor\/


"Right," managed Luna. "Umm, I think you just have to call." She waved in the vague direction of one of the numbers on the card, hoping that Dwyn was going to get the message there and do this call thing herself. It wasn't only because Luna didn't want to be booking an appointment with a stranger, it was also because Luna's brain was currently boldly displaying the message. "Brain.exe not responding. Requesting Reboot." Try to make even some modicum of sense of the past ten minutes was going her a minor headache and she didn't know what to do.

She heard Dwyn calling someone and getting patched through. Trying to tune that out for the moment, Luna ran through the information that had just been dumped on her, trying to make sense of it and figure out where on Earth all of this was going right now. Dwyn showing up randomly at her house had nearly made her faint. Especially since she'd spent quite a bit of not too long ago doing her best to forget about that whole thing and starting to believe maybe this was finally over. There was also the small matter of how Dwyn had somehow managed to find her address, but that was probably the least surprising part about this whole thing.

Luna would not put it past Dwyn to have figured that out the same way she did with those ID's, or probably this was part of the game, well who was she kidding, this was definitely part of the game, and whoever was in charge of running it probably ended up giving Dwyn her address. How they'd gotten her address when it wasn't exactly like she'd signed up was another question, but given they'd technically kind of sort of come looking for her to join this team it probably made enough sense. At some point some sort of address might have been exchanged. It's not like Luna was exactly a hard person to find anyway, well she wouldn't know at any rate. It wasn't like anyone every tried to actively find her for any reason.

Before she could go too long into that, Dwyn tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to here what the woman was saying.

"...yes...Christy, Agatha Christy, with the y yes. Obviously." Luna had no idea what Dwyn was going on about when the woman gave her a meaningful look and then pointed to the name on Conrad's card.

For a second Luna was confused again, then she realized Dwyn was probably asking for her name. Maybe Dwyn didn't remember her full name for some reason.

"Luna Taylor," she supplied, a bit hesitantly, not entirely sure if she was saying the right thing.

Dwyn rolled her eyes.

"Lena Taylor?" Luna, supplied, hoping this time she'd gotten the gist of what Dwyn was going with.

The woman proceeded to give her a "Are you Serious?" look and Luna panicked, glancing at the fanfic now loaded on her computer before replying with. "Lena Luthor."

For a second it looked like Dwyn was going to protest that too, but someone said something on the phone and she seemed to let out a sigh before responding. "Yes, my colleague is Lena Luthor. Correct. Appointment for Agatha Christy and Lena Luthor."

Luna blushed as she realized how ridiculous that sounded and hoped that whoever was on the other end of that line hadn't watched that particular show. Luckily it didn't look like Dwyn was having any sort of problem there, so Luna tuned that out for the moment.to go back to try and make sense of what had happened in the last few minutes.

Well more than what happened, the address part of this equation Luna could somewhat understand for the moment. The part she was now trying to wrap her head around was the whole gunmen part of the equation and Dwyn seeking her out for some sort of safety related thing. Well not exactly. From the little that Luna had managed to understand after the k word had been tossed about it sounded something like Luna might somehow give them information on Dwyn if these people, whoever they were would come after her. While that whole part sounded very Dwyn like, she really didn't know what to make of the whole attacking part of things.

The whole idea that the game isn't over and this is some sort of part two to the whole thing was seeming possible. It could explain a lot of things about how odd that ending had been and it would mean that instinct that had been bothering her for so long would finally make some modicum of sense. The only thing that gave her pause was the story. From what she had seen of this game so far they were definitely pretty strong when it came to creating all sorts of effects when they wanted. They didn't seem the type of designers to shy away from really going all out with their work. The prize money alone spoke for that. However, no matter how authentic you wanted to make an experience attacks were an entirely different level and she didn't even know if that was legal, at least not without having to sign some sort of contract.

"Well, if we're going to be making our consultation time, I think we need to be going now," said Dwyn," I don't know what you were upto, but I suggest you put some reasonably appropriate clothes on and get ready."

Luna looked up, her thoughts interrupted once again and nodded. She stood there for a second expecting Dwyn to leave, but it seemed the woman was momentarily lost in thought for a second.

Luna managed to raise her voice. "Umm...could...you uhh...step...out?" She was bright red as she said it, but Dwyn seemed to get the message, not even stopping for a smirk as she stepped out, closing the door behind her.

As Dwyn stepped outside, Luna's thoughts wondered to the possibility of this whole attack thing possibly being some sort of fake situation created by Dwyn to get her moving in this second part of the heist. Maybe Dwyn thought Luna wouldn't be willing to participate if there wasn't a big motivator. Her mind almost immediately dismissed the notion. Dwyn was many things, but it didn't seem possibly that even Dwyn would create a situation quite like that just for dramatic effect or to act as a motivator. At least she hoped not, it wasn't like Luna really knew the woman. Dwyn may as well not be her real name. Sure she'd acted that way in front of Red Shirt and been pretty convincingly annoyed, but Dwyn was also very good at pretending. Maybe she'd signed some sort of contract after all, and she'd been the only one with this whole attack angle that was meant to set off whatever this part of the game was meant to be. Luna pulled on the vast knowledge of heist movies she'd watched and wondered if perhaps this was going to simulate some kind of wrong artefact stolen storyline, or perhaps this was about them wanting to tie up loose ends. That seemed to be a pretty big motivator in a lot of movies, although in the case of something like that Luna wasn't entirely sure how one was supposed to win.

"We're not going for a party you know? I said presentable," remined Dwyn, from outside her door and Luna sped herself up a bit, finishing up and stepping outside. She had no idea how she was going to explain this to her parents or even Sadie, but she got the feeling it was probably a wise move to go now. It was once again the same sort of feeling that her told her this wasn't over. And well, that hadn't exactly been wrong the first time, maybe she should follow it now.

"Well let's get going," said Dwyn, already moving out the house. With how casual she was being, you'd almost think Luna was the one who was the guest here.

Luna nodded, following along. There was still a few more hours before her parents came home. She was almost tempted to not do anything, wait to see how this went with Conrad and make a decision there. As long as it didn't take too long she didn't have to tell anyone anything. The guilt from that though would probably be a bit too much to handle which is what prompted her to slow down ever so slightly as Dwyn walked ahead so she could fire off a couple of messages to both Sadie and her parents. Somehow Dwyn didn't even seem to notice. Not questioning her good luck, Luna continued after Dwyn, stepping into the car that was already out and waiting, not even questioning how it was already there when Dwyn had barely stepped out two minutes ago.

As Luna had expected, her parents responding text didn't show much concern. They seemed excited that there was more to go. Luna was almost going to let it slide and go with the flow now that one of those issues had been taken out of the equation but also as she had expected, Sadie was already calling not even a full minute after she'd sent that text.

Sneaking a glance at Dwyn, who only gave her a random smirk, Luna decided she may as well go ahead and answer it. The consequences of not answering would be much worse than the alternative. Besides, she'd be lying if she said it wouldn't be comforting to get Sadie's opinion on what's going.

"Luna, what's going on?" asked Sadie, as soon as she'd pressed answer, cutting right to the chase.

"Well...I think there's more..." began Luna.

"Are you sure its safe?" asked Sadie, not waiting for Luna to finish her explanation.

"Not completely," whispered Luna, voice dropping low to try and avoid Dwyn hearing but still not wanting to lie to Sadie.

"Do you think you have to go?"

"Unfortunately, yeah, something tells me that has to happen," confessed Luna, voice a little quiet again, but firm.

"I trust your gut here, but Lee, please be careful. You didn't look like you were in a good place for this," said Sadie," I can't tell you what to do, but..."

"I'll be careful," promised Luna, knowing full well where Sadie was going with that.

"Promise me you'll call me the moment you think something isn't quite right?" asked Sadie.

"I will," said Luna, this time speaking ever so slightly louder to let Sadie she meant it.

"Okay, please don't get hurt," said Sadie. If Luna wasn't imaging it, there almost seemed to be a slight shake to her voice.

"I won't," said Luna, "don't worry."

"Ok, I'll see you soon?" said Sadie. It sounded like a question.

"Yes," said Luna.

With that, the line went dead.

Luna turned to Dwyn after that, putting her phone away.

"Do we need have a plan of some sort?" asked Luna, slowly.

"Maybe," replied Dwyn, her reply unusually short.

Luna frowned, almost wanting to call her out on it. She'd noticed this when Dwyn hadn't even bat an eye earlier at her outfit. Not even a disapproving look. That was not the usual mode of operations for the woman. Now this reply here seemed to just be adding to that, not to mention the few seconds Luna had managed to sneak earlier to send of those texts.

Luna snuck another glance at Dwyn. It wasn't like Luna had spent a lot of time looking at Dwyn, but something just seemed ever so slightly off.

She took a deep breath, and debated between clearing her throat before deciding against it. "Are you okay?" Her voice wasn't the loudest bit it thankfully wasn't shaky.

Dwyn just seemed to give her a look. Luna couldn't exactly read it, but she tried to elaborate.

"You've been....quiet," Luna said after a second, before deciding she might as well take the plunge. "Less...umm...mean."

Dwyn muttered something under her breath that sounded vaguely like bem or bon.

"Umm...what?"

"Nothing, middle schooler," said the woman, although her voice almost seemed to be missing its usual bite.

Luna sat back in the car, choosing to remain silent the rest of the way. There'd be a bit of a journey ahead of them. If she'd read that business card correctly, they'd be going all the way back to Chicago.
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Ventomology says...



\/ Conrad Selingren \/


A game. Luna had called that whole thing a game. It was all Conrad could think about as he watched her walk away, off to her home or wherever she came from.

He'd been told he was helping someone reclaim an old possession. Dwyn seemed to have been told something else - though Conrad wasn't sure how much it mattered, since she was in it for the money. And Luna had been told this was all a game.

He felt a little sick. The rush of people all around him spun like the start of a hangover. The extra stolen items in his hockey bag weighed on his shoulder like Sisyphus's boulder. He felt like he'd been baited into roughing up a winger, only to see his opponents' forward sink a nasty puck right into the top shelf.

His car was still at the office. It had hardly been a single day.

Barely aware of his surroundings, Conrad headed for the rideshare level. He called an uber, balking at the price before realizing he had all the money he could ever want. Then he set his bag down, glad for the pads at the bottom keeping all the clay and stone inside from clinking, and dialed his boss.

"Selingren."

"Hey."

A car zoomed past. A family of six struggled to shove their luggage into the back of an already-packed minivan. The stink of gasoline rose up around him, and the heat of the Chicago summer bubbled under his skin.

"Look uh"-

"Is it done?" Conrad's boss asked.

Conrad took a long, shallow breath and leaned his head back, welcoming the pain of the stretch. "According to my bank account," he said, quoting Dwyn carefully. "But I don't know. You know the kid on my team?"

"There was a child on your team?"

"Well, I don't think she was legally a kid but like, you know, obviously not a whole grown-up."

"Get on with it."

Conrad scrubbed his face with his free hand before setting it on his bag to finger the front pocket. "Anyway. The kid got told this job was for a game."

Quiet on the line. God, he hoped his boss hadn't known about that. Conrad would have to start job hunting. He might have to go into witness protection or something. Change his name and everything.

"Anyway, I just. Something feels wrong," Conrad said, after a moment. "I don't think any of us were told the same think. We might have been played. Do we still have that unit rented out in the tower?"

Conrad's boss stayed silent for a long moment after that. The office tower the bank operated out of had apartments on several of the floors. They were fancy enough that Conrad wouldn't go for one himself, but his department kept one for anyone who happened to be dealing with end-of-fiscal-year finances.

"I'll lend you to the underwriting team. That should keep you busy enough to warrant using the department unit."

With a dry laugh, Conrad stood and hailed the grungy, silver sedan that pulled to a stop several paces away. There was his uber. "What, I haven't been busy enough? Fine. I'll take the Deere account."

His uber brought him to the closest station on his metra line, and from there he took the train back to his apartment in the suburbs. He'd always hated the way that the trains only ran in and out of downtown, making any route to the airport long and unnecessarily circuitous, but Dwyn's own strategy replayed in his mind: it was better to go the long way, if it meant losing a tail.

The late night trains were mostly empty. A few corporate stragglers sat with their headphones in and their phones out, heavy battery packs attached by strings of cords that Conrad worried he might trip over. The hum of the tracks passing under the train almost lulled Conrad to sleep as he watched the low-rise suburbs fly by outside the window.

He walked from the station to his apartment, lost in thought. Luna had thought the whole job was a game. No wonder none of them had ever been on the same page. At least it sounded like she'd been paid.

Oh god. Was she going to be okay? Conrad had the sneaking suspicion he was in over his head on this one, and he'd known going in that he wasn't exactly doing over-the-table work. At this point, he wasn't even sure he'd done a good thing. Maybe the artifact had never belonged to their client at all. Maybe he'd just straight-up stolen something, not returned it to a rightful owner.

That was not good.

The sidewalk passed under his feet, carrying him like a conveyor belt to his apartment. Conrad barely noticed the buildings around him, or the smattering of people still mulling about on the streets. His neighborhood was clean and well-lit, but its streets were devoid of nightlife. The only businesses here were the bougie coffee shops that rented out bougie space on the bottom floors of bougie mid-rise apartment buildings. Every building looked the same- same brick, same windows, same rectangular assortment of textures on the facades. Only muscle memory and address numbers set Conrad's home apart from the others.

He climbed the stairs to his third-story unit, took a deep breath, and leaned his forhead against the door. He was tired. Good grief.

The hallway light buzzed as he fished his keys out and unlocked the door, and the hinges groaned as he pushed his way inside. He lifted one foot to pry his shoes off, and then paused.

The light from the hall was a strange, glossy white, and it came into the apartment at an angle, illuminating the minute stains that crisscrossed Conrad's floor. The faint imprint of his oxfords made up most of the markings, but a smaller set of footprints with deep, well-spaced treads stood out on the floor.

Conrad took a deep breath. He reached for the coat closet and slowly pulled it open, glad that the landlord kept the hinges well oiled. Too bad it would work just as much in his favor as it would for whoever had come in. He pulled a hockey stick from the closet and held it at the ready--it wasn't a comparison he'd drawn since he was a kid, but the situation made him feel like he was a knight with a halberd.

He toed off his shoes, and his socks touched the floor, whisper-soft on the linoleum. Then he crept further into the apartment.

His kitchen was untouched. The shiny, barely-used stainless steel glowed under the lights as Conrad flicked them on. He couldn't see the footprints anymore, but he probably didn't need to. His loft didn't have that much space to hide in. Conrad spent so little time at home that despite the homey, second-hand furniture, there wasn't much clutter. The streetlight outside his porch window shone straight through the curtains in a clear box of light, indicating that the intruder wasn't back there.

Conrad glanced up at the loft. He didn't want to get into a fight up there. The loft ceiling might have been up to code, but any time he was vertical up there, he felt cramped. With a sigh, he reached for one of the tiny remotes on the living room end table and aimed for the string of lights he knew was up there.

The lights clicked on. A human shadow grew along the ceiling, stretching toward the stairs, and someone cursed.

"Okay, bro," Conrad said. "Jig is up, if you want to come out."

The shadow shifted, and Conrad saw the end of a thin barrel poke over the loft railing. Well. Up to the loft. He bolted for the stairs, careful to keep his stick high between him and the intruder. Something small and fast whipped toward him, and he batted it away before ducking lower, practically crawling up the steps instead of taking them two at a time.

He shot out of the top of the stairs, darting forward in a low hockey stance, and reached out with his stick. The intruder, dressed in all black, turned toward him, already kneeling.

Well. There went the tripping idea. Gritting his teeth, Conrad dropped the stick and leapt forward. He tumbled toward the sniper, colliding torso to torso, and grabbed desperately for the gun. His fingers wrapped around the barrel, and then slipped away as his attacker rolled off him. Conrad scrambled to catch up. He flung his whole body on top of the other person, trying to contain the mass of arms and legs. A fist met his jaw, and his knee met a squishy bit.

"Ow!"

"Yeah, buddy," Conrad hissed, ignoring the ache in his face, "that's what you get."

"It's not- not over."

Conrad shifted his weight, trying to cover more of his opponent, and found himself belly-up on the floor a moment later. His head rang, and his tailbone throbbed. No. He didn't have time to feel pain. With a growl, he twisted around and grabbed the guy's feet. They were right by the stairs. If he pulled just so-

Conrad's attacker slid forward, face first. Their gun flew from their hands, dropping down the steps with a loud clang, and the guy fell next. Their head met the steps with a loud thud, and Conrad watched as their back bent unnaturally, inertia pulling them ever forward.

He stumbled to his feet and stared down at the uncomfortable-looking heap at the bottom of the steps. Ugh, his head hurt. He needed to get to the office, where he'd have some modicum of safety.

Carefully, Conrad moved the intruder to a more comfortable position, then repacked his hockey bag with things he'd need to stay at the office for the week. He turned off all the lights, then as an afterthought, found an ice pack in the fridge and left it on the guy's head. The gun went in his bag, as did the entire content's of their pockets. Conrad didn't know what to do with any of it, but it seemed like something Dwyn would do.

Then he stepped back out and headed to the office.

~ ~


Underwriting was hell. Conrad's coworkers in the underwriting group seemed to like it well enough, but they were all crazy people. They actually liked all the predictions and forecasting and statistics and touchy-feely parts of it. Conrad just found it nerve-wracking. He could put up with row upon row of expense reports. He could not put up with guesswork.

His night at the office apartment unit had been alright. He'd woken up someone in the marketing department who had already been there, but they didn't mind him collapsing onto the couch for the few hours left between then and work. And hey, as long as Conrad was staying here, he didn't have to commute, and the entrance had a whole, real security team instead of just CCTV cameras and outsourced analysts.

He'd be safe as long as he never left the building.

Even at lunch, Conrad didn't leave. He bought a sandwich from the cafe inside the lobby and ate at his desk as he poured over a product distribution plan from John Deere. Conrad didn't know first thing about farm equipment, but there were some reports from their market analysis team in there that he needed to match up with earnings forecasts. It was just a pain manually putting everything together- John Deere's team had sent pdfs instead of excel files. Like a bunch of Chads.

Conrad had just taken a bite of his sandwich and copied a few numbers into his excel sheet when a shadow fell over his desk. He turned to look, surprised to see Peter from services management standing at his shoulder.

"'Sup Peter."

"Conrad."

They stared at each other for a moment. Peter played for the Shipwrights, Conrad's team's rival. He had a perfect beard, the kind guys wore in magazines, and neatly-cut brown hair, and he was a forward, which made him Conrad's natural enemy. Conrad's whole job on the ice was to mess with forwards.

"We got a call at services for you. Investment accounting consultation for four this afternoon. They didn't send anything, but it was a lot of money involved."

"Uhh cool?" Conrad didn't usually get requested. He preferred the day-to-day accounts of his own company over other people's money. And the bank took parts of his consultation fees. "What room are you putting us in?"

"I'll forward it to you," Peter said, tossing his weird, perfect widow's peak. "Just wanted to let you know so you don't miss it."

Office courtesy. Conrad just wished Peter didn't make it sound like he was doing such a huge favor. On the other hand, it was probably true that he would miss an email like that without any kind of notice. Sighing, Conrad polished off his sandwich and balled up the wrapping, enjoying the crinkle as the paper folded in his hands. He slid his chair out a few feet, spun around, and tossed the paper ball into a wastebasket across the office. Someone hollered. Karen from Underwriting snickered and tossed her own lunch remains across the office.

An email notification finally came in from Peter, popping up at the bottom of his excel file, and he clicked it open.

"Uhhh," he grumbled, "let's see... Lake Michigan Huddle Room... Four pm... Lena Luthor and Agatha Christy?" Conrad squinted. "I feel like. Have I heard those names somewhere?"

Evenlyn in the cubicle next to him leaned out and gave him a Look, but he couldn't figure out what it meant. "Are you serious?"

"Don't look at me like that. It's what it says." Conrad accepted the meeting invite and got it in his calendar, and then it was back to numbers.

He spent all day copying data for the Deere account before someone came by and showed him a trick for automating the pdf to excel process. And before he could fix all the bugs in his VBA code, his work calendar was pinging him for that four o' clock meeting. At a quarter-to, he locked his computer and pulled his notebook from his drawers.

The office was winding down by now. Most people were just finishing up, or idling until five, and the bustle had given way to quiet chats in hidden corners. It was summer, so they weren't anywhere near sunset, but the light from the glass facade seemed golden anyway. It made the office unbearably warm.

Conrad swung by marketing for a handful of service brochures, then stepped into the elevator down to their consultation floor. A few of his coworkers were already leaving, clutching bags with whatever work they had to bring home. The older man in front of Conrad pulled open his phone, and a picture of a girl who must have been his daughter flashed on the screen.

Conrad thought of Luna and Dwyn. Dwyn was probably fine. Was Luna? He had no way of getting in touch. Or maybe they still had some of the burners? Wait, no, he didn't have his any more, and he hadn't memorized the numbers.

He had already taken a hit to his rep by abandoning the University of Chicago stuff. He could take a few days of PTO, maybe. Look into the girls and find out if they were safe. Because while Conrad could handle himself, he wasn't sure about them. And he missed them. He'd liked that lie they told, where Luna was going to attend UC, and Dwyn was a cousin, and they were a perfect little extended family trying to make it work in the big city. It could still happen, kind of. Luna could go to UC. Maybe she would have to, if she got attacked. She could just come here and Conrad could look out for her. It was a little late, and he didn't think about it much, but he'd always wanted a little sister.

No. That was crazy. He'd never find them.

The elevator doors slid open, and Conrad squeezed past the people on their way to the tower's first floor, stepping into a well-lit, stylishly decorated lobby with a big, wooden front desk and tons of corporate art on the walls. He waved at the receptionist and started down a hallway, eyes peeled for Lake Michigan Huddle Room.

It took him a bit. He looped through the west wing of meeting rooms two times before realizing that all the conference rooms with lake names were on the east wing, and then he kept seeing all the other Great Lakes conference rooms, but not Lake Michigan. He was three minutes late when he walked past an open door and a woman reached out and grabbed him by the tie.

"Oh my god. Radical."

He stopped. He stared.

"Is it the height? Is that why you see nothing?"

"There are clouds around my whole neck," he said, unbelieving. He stumbled into the Lake Michigan Huddle room, a smile cutting across his face. "You're really here."

"Yeah we're here, you big dope," Dwyn said, shutting the door. She moved to step away, but Conrad wrapped her up in a hug and lifted her off the floor. "Nope. Nope! Why are you like this. Please put me down."

"I- I thought it looked kind of fun."

Conrad picked up Luna next. She at least hugged him back. "Are you two okay?" he asked, setting her down gently. "I caught someone in my apartment."

Dwyn shrugged and took a seat, and Luna followed suit.

"I had an encounter too," Dwyn said. "Went to go pick this one up right after just in case. I figured you could handle yourself in the meantime."

"Are you okay?" Luna asked.

Conrad grinned. "I'll be alright, kiddo. Just a couple bruises." He was so happy. It was like coming back to the ice after a long break. "I guess you're not here for an investment consultation though, huh?" Even though it would be a good use of their ten million dollars.

"Maybe when this is all over," Dwyn said. Her eyes darted around the room for a moment before she gestured for everyone to lean in close. "But I think for now we deal with the people coming after us."

"Oh?" Conrad asked.

"How do we do that?" Luna followed up.

Dwyn grinned and pulled the very artifact they'd stolen from her pocket. "Well. I was thinking we'd start with this."

"Oh. My. God," Luna gasped.

Conrad wasn't sure if he was even surprised any more. He blinked, not sure if he was seeing things correctly. Maybe he was hallucinating. He needed to submit a PTO request soon, because things were about to get real busy.

"Wait," he said, before they could start planning their next heist. "Who are Lena Luthor and Agatha Christy?"
"I've got dreams like you--no really!--just much less, touchy-feeley.
They mainly happen somewhere warm and sunny
on an island that I own, tanned and rested and alone
surrounded by enormous piles of money." -Flynn Rider, Tangled
  





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winterwolf0100 says...



\/Dwyn Souza\/


Dwyn had to admit-- she was surprised that she didn't completely hate the reactions the other two had had when seeing her. She didn't care for them, but she didn't dislike that they cared for her. At least, that was what she was going to tell herself. Her emotions were currently so jumbled inside her that she was attempting to just ignore them all-together.

The long trip back to Chicago had been a bore. Luna had continued glancing at her a few times, but had said nothing without first being asked. Dwyn had done the usual, "So what did you do the last day-and-a-half?" and "Did anyone try to kill you?" but Luna had deflected most of the questions with nervous half-answers that were barely more than a sentence or two-- or she began to ramble, which was somehow worse. There were a few times she mentioned someone named Sadie, blushed, and then mumbled a few things before changing the subject entirely, which Dwyn found to be the most interesting parts of the trip-- mainly because when she brought her up again, Luna acted like she wasn't sure what she was referring to. If it was something interesting enough to make Luna lie to her, then it was certainly intriguing enough for Dwyn to try to get some answers out of her on the subject later. She'd ended up not pushing it though, her mind lost in everything that had happened over the past day.

The hospital visit with her father had been heart-breaking, and she tried to force it out of her mind entirely, which meant she was either focused on the conversations with her siblings-- no, she wouldn't do that-- or she was focused on everything that had happened with Derek-- also a complicated subject now, it seemed. She'd never figured him to be the type of person to break the rules. Well, she'd figured him to be the type of person to break the rules, but not to break the rulebreaking rules. Never give out your address: that was a big one. It was one of the first things she'd learned, from him of all people. He'd asked how he could reach her, and she'd given him her phone number, which he immediately tore up when he realized it was her real one, and her address, which he had told her to never tell another person in the business again. And that was when she had realized she was in the big leagues. She was really going to do this. He'd helped her buy her first disposable phone, showed her a few places she could start shopping for her more suspicious items without attracting someone's attention, and then he'd given her space to figure everything out without him watching. He'd given her the privacy to do what needed to be done in a way where he couldn't be used as a witness against her.

And now, he'd taken her to his condo. He hadn't just given her the address, he'd taken her there. She'd seen what floor he lived on, what car he drived, his selection of decorative pillows. It was way more intimate and personal than she'd been with anyone in years, and out of all people, she never would've expected it from him. Even Luna and Conrad, who had no common sense, had had the common sense not to give out their home addresses! And he had just...

Her mind pulled up the memories of running down the street, turning the corner, breaking down sobbing. That had never been supposed to happen. She knew it was a stupid thing to take something from someone who had just given her ten million dollars, but she hadn't figured it was something that would get her killed. She'd done it dozens of times, and most of the time the employer was so rich that they didn't even notice it was missing. She knew she didn't have a problem with stealing-- she could definitely stop if she actually needed to, she was certain of that-- but it had at the very least caused a problem, especially this time. She considered being cut off to be her family's fault, not the stealing. But this time, it had definitely been her fault, and now they were going after all of them. What would've happened if they had gone after Luna first instead of her?

And in her moment of practical hysteria, the moment when she had had no control over her emotions compared to usually controlling everything-- in that moment, she had called... his face came to mind, his sarcastic and witty smile, how he never treated her as less than him for any reason, no matter what. She'd been getting jobs through him for years, and he'd never held that over her head. Well, he'd joked about it and made fun of her for it on numerous occasions, but she'd never seriously felt threatened by it. How could she, when it was... well, Derek? He'd never felt threatening. Dangerous, maybe, at times, but not towards her. But he was the only person outside of her family that she'd never felt tempted to steal from, at least not after he'd caught her stealing his watch when they'd met. She'd stolen from all her other employers, but she hadn't ever stolen from the middle man. And now, thinking on it, she wasn't sure if that was because she couldn't get jobs without him or because he didn't have anything worth stealing or... but she knew it wasn't either of those. She just... didn't feel like stealing from him. And why was that? She'd seen plenty of expensive things in his condo, and the thought hadn't even crossed her mind to take any of them.

That was different though. She'd been in a mode of weakness, she hadn't been thinking clearly. But did that mean that her natural state of being was one in which she didn't think of stealing? And in that case, what did that say about whether or not she could control her urge to steal? Well of course she could control it, she clearly hadn't stolen from him. But the thought hadn't crossed her mind at the time, and if it hadn't, how could she have made a conscious choice not to steal from him?

And he had decorative pillows.

The whole situation with Derek had overwhelmed her, and she'd had plenty of time to obsess unhealthily over it on the way back to Chicago. Eventually, she'd forced that out of her mind too, and stared blankly out the window, trying to keep her mind off anything and everything except for the meeting ahead.

And when they'd gotten there, someone had shown them to an empty, bland room, one with a meeting table and a turned-off tv and eight black chairs on wheels that looked like they were missing their rich white executives. And she had to watch Conrad pass by their room at least three times before she reached out and dragged him in. And that was when she snapped back into her mind-- because if this was what she was working with, she was going to have to be on the edge of her seat at all times. It was clear neither of them would be able to do it on their own.

After Conrad's suffocating hug, she took in a deep breath and prepared her mind for what was ahead-- they had a lot of work to do.
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
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KateHardy says...



\/Luna Lee Taylor\/


Luna wasn't sure where this was going, but something about this plan was suddenly setting her instincts off again. That was never a good sign. It was the sort of gut instinct that seemed almost like a superpower. It didn't happen to Luna very often, or at least it hadn't happened to Luna very often, not in the past nineteen years of her life. And yet, now it was flaring up for the third time in the span of what had been roughly twenty four hours or probably even less. That couldn't possibly be good, not when it came to the instincts that had saved her from unwanted situations countless times.

So, as Dwyn pulled that piece out, a fact she was still very much trying to process and barely succeeding, and Conrad posed a question that Luna should totally have been all over, Luna was lost in through, struck by the feeling that this plan somehow seemed so much more real. It didn't feel like it could just be packaged neatly into a pre laid out heist game anymore. She knew the notion was ridiculous. How on Earth could she have gotten tangled up with a real heist. No. If that was the case Luna would probably be dead by now, well that was assuming she'd ever have pulled it off. She probably would be in jail now. Breaking into places in real life had to be so much harder than what had gone down in the last couple of days right? Surely actual museum locks weren't that easy to open, not to mention information on sensitive artefacts that people were willing to pay millions for being that easy to find.

As she tried and just about barely managed to force that down, Luna immediately jumped on Conrad's earlier question, hoping for an escape from these suddenly very serious thoughts with some good ol fashioned education in pop culture for on Conrad...somebody. Luna was positive she'd learnt Conrad's last name at some point in the past week or so, but somehow it wasn't registering. Even her usually good memory had somehow let that slip. She didn't blame it. The information that it had needed to catalogue in the past few hours were not exactly easy ones.

"Well, Agatha Christy should be pretty obvious. That's very clearly a play on Agatha Christie....I think anyway. I heard Dwyn over here change the spelling of that second name. And please don't tell me you've never heard of Agatha Christie. That's a name that should have been mentioned by someone at least in passing. She's a pretty famous actress, although yes maybe not exactly the most recent one." Luna let her ramblings flow out. Normally she'd be blushing bright red by now and clamping a hand over her mouth. Well, she was actually blushing bright red at the moment, but instead of clamping a hand over her mouth, she let it flow. It would at least make this situation pass by just that little bit easier and right now Luna could do with a bit of that. With that in mind, she dived right into the trench that was Lena Luthor.

"As for Lena Luthor," Luna began, getting even redder as she remembered how she'd come up with it. Dwyn was probably going to judge her for this one, although Luna would have decent ground to stand on given that Dwyn hadn't exactly gone fully original with her name either. That had to count for something if Dwyn tried to point out that she'd straight up copied a fictional character's name. "I don't know if you watch a lot of superhero based tv shows and stuff, but she's a character from the one called Supergirl. I umm....."

Luna blushed ever brighter as she decided she might as well go through with this explanation. "So umm....I was reading this one fanfic from said show when Dwyn showed up. Its just this umm...ship that the writers never had the courage to do...and I totally don't have a crush on both those two...no I don't...but that happened to be on my mind, and when Dwyn gave me this look, I kind of panicked and umm...so there's that."

Luna was pretty sure she was going to spontaneously combust in a few seconds now. "I mean its not exactly inappropriate though. Lena's the CEO of a pretty big company who has to look at accounts and such...I think...I don't know that much about what the CEO of a company actually does," she finished, voice dropping off at the end.

She had no idea what Conrad, and especially Dwyn was going to make of any of the nonsense that had just spewed from between her lips, nor did she know if they would have even heard any of what she'd just uttered, but what she had definitely done was managed to somewhat distract herself from her growing thoughts. Once whatever this planning entailed had been taken care of and Luna got a second to herself, she was definitely going to have to call Sadie and then get her opinion on all of this. That would definitely make her feel a lot better about all of this. She had no idea when she'd somehow shifted to relying on Sadie to feel better about all of this, but she definitely did not have time to sift through these feelings at the moment.

She braved a look at Conrad and Dwyn. Conrad was gaping at her, looking ever so slightly like some sort of goldfish. Whether he was still just surprised about what Dwyn had pulled out or whether he was simply trying to process what Luna had just uttered, Luna was probably never going to know. Dwyn on the other hand almost seemed pensive, like she was putting together pieces of a puzzle that were now starting to fit together. Luna didn't know what that second look was going on about, but she was not going to try and wait to find out, immediately deciding maybe changing the subject away from her rambling was probably the way to get this group back on track.

"So, umm...we had something like a plan in mind?" she began.
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KateHardy says...



\/Luna Lee Taylor\/


written with @winterwolf0100 and @Ventomology


Luna looked expectantly at the duo that still looked a bit like they were frozen. She hadn't accidentally said something offensive or rude had she? Her rambles could be a bit unpredictable yes but they were never usually this good at freezing people up for nearly this long.

"Hmm... so you're gay," Dwyn said coolly as she began to walk around the room snooping like she hadn't already done that before Conrad had come in.

Conrad stared at Dwyn, open-mouthed. "Oh, uh. Rad, I guess?"

"I'm disappointed in you Radical. Not everything is about you."

He bumbled through his words, turning a bright red and saying, "No, I-- that's not-- you're the one who"-

Dwyn cut him off and turned back to Luna. "So," she repeated, "you're gay."

"Ohh...umm...well...that..." said Luna, head spinning all of a sudden. She had not meant to accidentally blurt that out quite so clearly but to be completely honest she was just surprised that it had taken them quite that long to realize it. She had been told entirely too many times, most notably by her parents when she's officially tried to come out, that she was far too obvious about it to reliably fool anybody.

Dwyn watched her with raised eyebrows, then grinned. "So who's Sadie?"

"Soo.." began Luna, frantically looking for a topic that could reduce the awkwardness that was currently in the air. "Umm...we were talking about being attacked and all of that..." She trailed off. Given how Conrad had received them and how that whole scenario was starting to make her a tiny bit nervous about this. Dwyn was being...mostly Dwyn like besides that slightly weird moment earlier at her house when Dwyn hadn't been quite as mean as expected, but Conrad also seemed to have some sort of genuine fear going on here. This company was either going a bit overboard on providing an authentic experience with this next phase of the heist or something much worse was going on. Luna decided now would not be the greatest of times to reflect on that.

"I mean, you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," Conrad said. "Bros respect each others'-- Wait, I feel like I shouldn't say that word in front of you."

"Yes...so, umm maybe we need to focus on like finding a place where we can't be attacked," began Luna, her need to change the subject being overwritten by a bit of genuine concern here given the events of the past couple of minutes. "I think maybe that's a priority and we can figure out our next move from there." She had no idea what she was doing here trying to direct this meeting, but she kept babbling on hoping that Dwyn would pick up at this point.

Dwyn however, still seemed slightly off her game, almost like she was lost in thought for a few moments, and as a result, the only response she gave was a delayed, "So you going to say who Sadie is?" It was like nothing Luna had just said had actually processed in her brain. Or maybe she'd just zoned out when Luna had started to talk. Unfortunately, Luna felt like that happened quite a bit with some people.

"Umm...I can't believe I'm saying this, but umm...maybe we have bigger...umm..problems," she managed, unable to avoid going bright red but somehow managing to complete her sentence."

"There's not much to be worried about now that they already tried and failed to kill us. As long as we get somewhere untraceable we'll be fine, and all we need to do for that is use cash," Dwyn said.

"Which we have right?" said Luna, "or like is the stuff we just got not usable because they can track it or something something blah blah. Also if we're going somewhere untraceable, maybe like a private plane or something, they can't catch us even if they wanted to...not because its like totally the coolest move to make." Maybe going flashy would give them extra points. The book she'd said about escape rooms hadn't covered anything like this, but there was always a chance.

Dwyn, in what seemed a revival of her normal character, gave Luna a look that showed exactly how dumb that idea was. "Luna," she said sickly sweet, and Luna knew she was in for trouble because Dwyn never just used her name. "Do you have any idea how much a private plane costs? Or how flying regulation works? Or the fact that if we want to go off the grid, a plane would be quite literally the worst way to do it?"

"It was..just..a..umm..joke," squeaked Luna, trying to salvage the moment. 'Umm...what do you suggest then?"

"No rentals," Dwyn said immediately. "Those usually require a credit card and generally have trackers in them."

"Also they're a rip-off," Conrad advised. "Only use them for company trips."

"Right...yeah..." said Luna, before doing a double take, "so like...we have to take an uber or something...no wait, I'm guessing public transport probably." She did her best to not look like she had no idea what she was talking about.

Dwyn looked at her funny. "Don't be stupid, we can't get caught on any cameras."

"Well then what are we going to do?" Luna asked weakly.

"We're going to buy a car," Dwyn answered confidently.

"Whoa," Conrad said. "Slow down, speed racer."

"Right, because no sane person would randomly do that to run away," said Luna, "is that like to throw them off...and we're actually going to...okay nevermind, that's...yeah...so car...from nearby ish I assume. We'll have to walk to the dealership."

Dwyn nodded. "We'll register it under a fake name, pay in all cash, buy one of their used ones so we don't draw attention with a new model."

"Right..umm will...like paying in cash be kind of shady or do people just not care about that sort of thing?" asked Luna, now genuinely curious since it seems Dwyn wasn't going to tease her for the moment.

"Give someone enough money and they'll ignore anything. Besides, it puts the money in their pockets sooner."

"Of course..." said Luna, "that probably should have been obvious, so do we like leave now or umm...Conrad do you have to like remain at work for the rest of the day?"

"Uhhh, yeah? I got put on this insane account"-

Dwyn cut Conrad off mid-sentence. "That's nice," she said, "but we need to leave now before they catch on to where we went. They'll be going to Luna's house, and when they find she isn't there--"

"Wait so...umm...how long do you think they'll take cause like my parents...are there...and umm will they..." said Luna. She did not want to voice the last part of thought. That would make it sound real. That was not conducive to her functioning properly or at all. "Do I have to tell them not to go home or something?"

With an exasperated sigh, Dwyn moved to reply, but Conrad held his hand up and gave Luna a long, searching look. "Hold on. Luna, what were you told about this job?"

She blinked at him, not expecting the change in direction, and shot both Conrad and Dwyn a confused look. Dwyn too seemed tense--Conrad's shift took her off guard as well, only she hid it better.

"Um. Well. I mean, I guess you guys must have gotten the same thing. It's like a competition, right? Some kind of... why are you looking at me like that?"

Dwyn had leaned forward, elbows on the table, her expression darkening. Conrad gulped solemnly, his wide shoulders coming up level with his chin. Pain flashed in his eyes and wrinkled his brow, and then he ran a hand through his hair and looked up, as if asking a higher power to grant him aid.

"Here is my guess," he said, holding up one finger. "Dwyn, this sort of thing is in your wheelhouse; you clearly know what you're doing, at least way more than me and Luna. You were asked plainly to steal something." He put up a second finger. "My letter implied I was rightfully returning the artifact we stole to its original owner." He put up a third and looked straight at Luna. "And you were told that this was a game."

Luna swallowed, the realization hitting her, but her throat closed, bone dry and uncooperative. "No," she said weakly.

Dwyn looked like she was ready to murder someone. She stood half out of her chair, one hand clenched into a fist on the table and the other tugging into her hair. "Agh, that explains so much. I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's so stupid--"

"It's not stupid," Conrad broke in. "Neither of you seem like you've worked much as a team. It's normal to not understand that we might not all be on the same page. Even I didn't suspect anything until recently, and I've been working in groups my whole life."

"No, I should've known." Dwyn's tone was way more aggressive than normal as she pushed her way back into the conversation. She seemed almost hysterical as she chuckled to herself. "I mean, you two are so stupid what else could it have been? You know nothing about what you're doing!" She turned on Luna, her voice stretching into a growl as it raised in volume. "A game? A game?! Você está de brincadeira comigo?!"

Luna shrank back at the tone of Dwyn's voice. If she wasn't already half in shock at the revelation that Conrad had just made she'd probably have burst into tears. As it is she just stared into space, eyes losing focus for a bit as everything seemed to blur a bit. Her thoughts overwrote the noise around her as she tried desperately to dismiss all the implications this was bringing up. She was doing her absolute hardest not to lose it right now but this was a little too much for her heart to try and process at the moment.

She managed to muster just about enough movement from her shocked body to turn around as the dam broke and the tears began to fall.. She had to wipe them but...her hands were refusing to move for the moment. This was going to take a second, which would probably make Dwyn more mad. A shudder ran through her. She closed her eyes.
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Ventomology says...



\/ Conrad Selingren \/


Well. This talk was not going well.

Conrad puffed out his cheeks and blew out a long, slow breath. He needed to stay chill. He'd captained his club team in high school. He could totally deal with high emotions. He just had to ignore the fact that high school had been more than a decade ago and that usually his teammates were too deep into their bro stoicism to cry.

What was he supposed to do first? Address Luna? Try to get her to stop? Maybe he should deal with Dwyn first. It might be harder for Luna to calm down with all the yelling and blaming and... yeah okay. That settled that.

Conrad placed a hand on the manilla folder of investment info that he'd brought with him. He could do this. He was the grown-up here.

"Dwyn," he said, pitching his voice as deep as it would go without being ridiculous. "I don't appreciate being called stupid. You can be constructive, or you can stop."

Dwyn watched him, her face a complete mask of fury. "Constructive? I'm the only one who has done anything this entire time!" Her voice seemed to raise higher and higher with every word. "I could've done that heist in my sleep! But no, they put in two people who don't know what they're doing, and I just thought, 'If it's what the employer wants!'"

Well, usually it was about what the client wanted. And the client had wanted them all to finish this one task, ignorant of the greater circumstances. They'd done a top-shelf job of it too, until Dwyn and the rest of their team had pulled a fast one.

"You really think you're the only one who contributed anything?" Conrad asked, trying his best to stay level. He'd dealt with divas before - heck, one of them was in the NHL now. "Dwyn, whether or not you could have done this alone is totally irrelevant. We got this far as a team, and you know it."

"Did we?" Dwyn said, approaching a level of complete anger, no sarcasm, no wit, that Conrad had never seen before. She seemed on the end of her rope, like everything was about to implode. "Can you name one thing, one thing, that either of you two did that I didn't have to help with?"

Conrad took a steadying breath and shot Luna a reassuring look. The poor kiddo looked like she was about to crawl under the table. Then he tapped a finger on the desk and turned back to Dwyn. "The floor plans? Electronic locks that would have required a hell of a lot more prep without... whatever it is Luna did to them? How long would it have taken you to handle everything by yourself?"

Dwyn muttered to herself in Portuguese for several sentences and dragged her fingers down her face. Now that Conrad was looking, she looked extremely worn out. "I know what I'm doing," she said finally, her voice still sharp though she wasn't yelling anymore. "I can handle things by myself-- and I would've if I hadn't been chained down by you two."

Well, these things took time. And Luna had finally stopped actively crying-- she had settled into hiccupping breaths, arms wrapped around herself as she watched the two older members of the group start to calm down.

"I have no doubt," Conrad said, offering one of his most--hopefully--charming smiles. At least he wasn't missing teeth like some of his old teammates. "You're very capable, and the two of us are really thankful for that." He moved his hand over the investment folder and opened it up. "Now, I'm sure you have plans for your cut of the prize, but do you want to know how to make it look completely above board and grow it faster than the S&P Five-Hundred?"

Dwyn glared at him for several seconds, seeming to imagine cutting through him with her eyes, then turned away from him to look at Luna. "Come on, middle schooler." She walked to the door.

"Are you sure?" Conrad interjected. He still had one last ace up his sleeve. "I know your bank information."

Dwyn started to scoff, but he cut her off. "All of it. You're not the only one with a specialized set of skills, Ms. Souza. Now, you can scuttle off and only look out for yourself, or you can come back in a few minutes when we've all calmed down, and I'll tell you what I've learned about our client in the past few days."

Dwyn watched him for a few seconds, then walked up to him and slapped him. "If you ever talk like you know me again, I'll leave you both for dead," she seethed. Then she stomped through the door, slamming it shut on her way out.

Conrad waited a second, then deflated, running a hand through his hair and offering Luna as much of a smile as he could muster. "Well, that could have gone better. I think she's just going to clean up, if you want to go with her. Or I have tissues."

Sniffling, Luna sent him a watery smile. "I- I think I'll go in a second. Thanks for, um, what you said about me."

"Credit where credit is due, kid," he replied. "And you'll find your footing - sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you've got that no one else does. Now shoo-- I need to get back to hockey bro mode."

That got a little laugh out of her. Luna waved, half-hiding her red-rimmed eyes behind her hand, and quietly followed Dwyn into the hall.
"I've got dreams like you--no really!--just much less, touchy-feeley.
They mainly happen somewhere warm and sunny
on an island that I own, tanned and rested and alone
surrounded by enormous piles of money." -Flynn Rider, Tangled
  





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Fri Sep 02, 2022 5:57 am
winterwolf0100 says...



\/Dwyn Souza\/


Dwyn got into the bathroom as quickly as possible, checked to make sure no one else was there, then screamed in frustration. She strongly considered punching the mirror just to watch her reflection shatter like her life was currently doing before her eyes. She had been stupid to think that either of them would've listened to her when she'd told them to forget her name. To think that they wouldn't have taken advantage of knowing her full name the moment they had the opportunity to. To-- no, she hadn't trusted them. She couldn't go that far. But she had trusted their innocence. She had trusted their naiveté to not realize they should remember that information. But of course he had. Conrad's entire job was to remember things like that, his entire life was finance. And Dwyn had been gullible to think he wouldn't use it against her. But still, some part of her felt almost-- attacked, knowing that he had. Like some contract of boundaries had been breached when he'd said her last name like that-- like he knew her. Like he knew anything about her.

She gripped the edge of the counter, staring with a stone-cold fury into her reflection's eyes, and felt everything break as she started to cry, head hung down and curly hair falling out of its hairband and into her eyes. Everything had happened all at once. Her father, the intruders, the confusing emotions she couldn't even begin to sort out with Derek. And somehow, Conrad and Luna's predictability had felt like a constant she could always count on. Well, she had clearly been mistaken.

She tried to slow her breaths, knowing that one of them would likely come after her. She wouldn't allow them to see her like this. She wouldn't have before, but especially not now. Especially not after feeling so violated. She ripped a paper towel out of a dispenser and furiously wiped it under her eyes, her deep, shaky breaths filling the room as she tried to stop the tears.

There was a sound from behind her, a door closing behind her and then a sudden gasp. Dwyn breathed in quickly and straightened her posture, angling herself so she couldn't be seen as she tried to control herself.

"Hello," came a very quiet voice.

Dwyn knew it was Luna. She took in a deep breath and steadied her voice. She wouldn't acknowledge whatever Luna had just seen, verbally or nonverbally. "Hello," she said quietly, trying her hardest to keep her voice steady and calm.

"Are you...are you okay? I'm sorry." Luna still sounded shaky.

Dwyn couldn't gather the energy to even be sarcastic in her response. "I'm fine," she said. She quickly wiped her face one more time with the paper towel before turning around and throwing it away, maintaining a straight face as she made eye contact with Luna.

Luna looked down at the floor. She was still shaking silently "I...umm...I'm sorry for..." She shook her head like she wasn't sure. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I'm me. P..Please don't.." She trailed off.

Dwyn watched her silently for several seconds, then said softly, "Luna, my job is to be invisible. I do not have a family. I do not have anybody. I am not anybody. If someone remembers me, I have done my job wrong. Do you understand? Neither of you know anything about who I am outside of these walls. This personality, the woman you think you know? She doesn't exist. I made her up." She paused for a moment, then turned to face the mirror as she carefully undid her hair and began to pull it back into a ponytail, making it neater and making her look more like the Dwyn that she'd been around them. Dwyn made eye contact with Luna through the mirror, already looking much more pulled together than she had even a few moments ago.

"Come here," she said.

Luna slowly walked over. She raised her hands. "Do..don't worry. I...I..I won't be trying to remember any of this. Ever. You...you do your job well." She rubbed at her eyes like she was trying to erase something.

Dwyn watched her for a second, then smiled slightly. "You're misunderstanding what I mean." She turned away for a second to grab another paper towel, then wet it under the sink and wrung it out so it was damp but not dripping. She turned back to face Luna and gently patted it along her face, softly erasing the marks the tears had made down her face. "If I'm too mean," she said carefully, "I can be remembered. And I know you'll always remember me from those moments, maybe as the only way you'll remember me. And you shouldn't be able to."

She couldn't bring herself to make it any more concrete than that. Apologies were not her strongsuit, especially not when it came to emotions. She wasn't even sure her mouth could properly say the words, "I'm sorry".

Luna seemed to stiffen a little at her touch but she didn't move, standing still and listening. She nodded slowly once Dwyn was done and flashed one of the fakest smiles Dwyn had seen on the girl. Dwyn could tell she hadn't understood. She almost said something, but bit her tongue. Instead, she took in a deep breath and tucked a piece of strand hair behind Luna's ear. She couldn't tell what this emotion was. She didn't think it was something as strong as affection, but maybe it was a small taste of what it would've felt like if Dwyn had been allowed around her nieces and nephews. The thought brought a sour taste to her mouth.

"Go tell Conrad to pack up all his things. We can't afford to stay until the end of his work day."

"Okay," said Luna with a nod. She nodded another time before she turned to leave.

"Luna, you are not stupid," Dwyn said suddenly. "And you should never apologize for being yourself."

The girl froze. She turned, the watery smile on her face this time looking a lot more real. And then she was gone, almost running out of the bathroom.

Dwyn took an unsteady breath-- in, and out. She looked at herself in the mirror, rebuilding her composure bit by bit as she watched her facial expression change. She would act like the entire confrontation had never happened, and if he ignored it too, then she would move on. She would come back to it no doubt, but with people trying to kill them, it was hardly the time. Her mind was attempting to process a thousand new pieces of information at once, and it was feeling nearly impossible to keep track of everything. But she'd do it-- she always did.
he/she/they


winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni
omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver
winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
  





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Sat Feb 25, 2023 4:05 am
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Ventomology says...



\/ Conrad Selingren \/


Blowing out a long, exhausted sigh, Conrad fell back into a chair like magic-bean-Jack's dying giant. The whole room rattled with him, settling down from all the tension.

Man, that sucked. He hated riling people up like that. It was one reason Conrad was glad for the injury that took him out of the NHL pipeline; he never could've made it as a professional enforcer, with all that trash talk. But hey, it had startled Dwyn enough to get her to stop yelling, and that had been his goal. Even if now he was going to live in her little black book of Awful No-Good People for the rest of his days--however many he had left.

He slumped over and watched the door handle longingly. The girls would come back. They had to. Conrad had shown his hand, demonstrated exactly what he was capable of as either an enemy or a friend, and Dwyn for sure wasn't going to just let him go. And he wasn't going to let Luna and her parents live a life in peril when he was a grown-up who could do something about it.

His watch ticked by his ear, and Conrad dragged his manilla folder around on the desk with one finger. Obviously Luna would want a few minutes to clean up her face after crying, but did they have to take so long? They needed to talk strategy! And sure, the team was so cobbled together they were the equivalent of a bunch of mites who couldn't pull off a St. Louis drill, but still. A little planning went a long way.

He was just about to slide out of his chair when the door flew open. Dwyn stood in the doorway, bodily shielding Luna from view. Surprisingly, her eyes were just as red-rimmed as the kiddo's, which meant Conrad was even more in the doghouse than he thought.

She wrinkled her nose at him, obviously pretending she had not just been crying, and ushered Luna into the room, closing the door with a soft click behind her. "Alright, Radical. Let's talk."

Wow. Conrad could feel his entire being just sinking into the floor. "Yep. Okay. And for the record, I only looked for the one account you used for this specific job. Not uh... all your real ones."

Luna gave him a watery are-you-serious look, and Dwyn glared as she sat down.

"Nevermind, I'm just not going to bring this up again."

"Good," Dwyn said sharply. "Now pack up your things. We're leaving."

Conrad balked, accidentally banging his knee on the underside of the table. His folder spilled off the table in an avalanche of financial advice. "What?! But I haven't slept in like two days. And I have this insane underwriting porfolio that I'm working on."

Dwyn levelled him with a stern raise of her eyebrows. "Oh, I'm sorry, I had no idea you had an underwriting portfolio you were working on. By all means, we'll wait all day for you!"

In the corner of his eye, Conrad saw Luna trembling just a little. Okay. He needed to back up. "It's an excuse to dig around the bank's transactions!" he squeaked. That was so embarrassing. He hadn't squeaked since puberty. "To find some leads on you-know-who. And so I could sleep in the office tower, since it's really safe here. I promise if you give me like five hours I'll be all done, and then we can get the car."

"Is this pl...place sa..safe?"

"Well, the office? Not really. I mean, you guys just walked in here and everything"-

Dwyn made a face like she was about to make a very good point, and Conrad leapt to beat her. He needed sleep. They all needed sleep. "But the company owns a handful of highrise units, and those are like, super hard to get into. You have to either have a code and a keycard from the company, or fly in through a thirty-seventh-story window."

Dwyn was clearly not convinced. She crossed her arms and rolled her eyes, and Conrad desperately tried to come up with another argument to refute whatever she was about to say. He found nothing; he'd used up all his thinking energy getting everyone to cool off earlier.

"Yeah, I and I bet it's so hard to get that code."

It wasn't that hard, and Conrad knew Dwyn could see it on his face as he thought it. "Okay, no, but they don't just give it out to anyone, and"-

"Nope. We're leaving. Pack it up, Radical."

"Give me an hour? Please? I was so close to figuring out the mess of shell companies before we had this meeting." If Conrad had to beg, he could beg. One time, he'd had to slide across the ice on his knees and tackle his own team's first string left winger just to keep the guy from getting into a fistfight. Wingers were not meant for fights. "And if you two can plug a little dongle into the company servers for me, then I'll be able to keep researching on the road."

"We'll plug something in, and then we're leaving. If you can do it on the road, then we need to leave," Dwyn said, not giving any room for budging.

"Okay, okay. Um. Right." Conrad fished around in one of his suit pockets and pulled out a little USB drive. He held it out, and Dwyn snatched it out of his hands. "Cool, cool. So, technically, every floor of the office has an IT cabinet, but the real money servers live on the eighteenth floor. Your best bet is the fire stairs--you'll need a janitor's fire key to open the door without tripping the alarm, but then Luna should be able to get into the floor with uh... the thing."

Dwyn looked at Luna. "Got all that?"

Luna nodded. "Open door...let...Dwyn do thing."

"There's all kinds of hardware in there, so this next part is important. Most of the server banks are for memory and computing, but the dongle has to go in the central distribution unit, which is close to the elevator bays." Conrad didn't really know why it went there. But he'd been asked to clean up someone's financial mess before, and the first step was always putting a dongle in whatever computer bit connected servers to other computer bits. "It looks exactly like all the other ones, but with more space between all the chips? And it looks like a porcupine kind of. The others are... less porcupine-y."

"Fine," Dwyn said smoothly. "I could do this in my sleep." She gestured for Conrad to get on with his own stuff and looped an arm loosely over Luna's shoulders. "You have twenty minutes, Radical."

The girls left, Luna trying her best to look as natural as Dwyn, and Conrad blinked. Okay, cool. He was masterminding this kind of stuff now. Well, Dwyn was doing all the work, really, and he was definitely still on her bad side, and he really needed to pick up his papers and get back to poking around the transactions that had happened to deliver money to his bank account. But yeah, totally a mastermind.

He dumped his manilla folder in the recycling bin and fastwalked to his desk. Time to research some shell companies.
"I've got dreams like you--no really!--just much less, touchy-feeley.
They mainly happen somewhere warm and sunny
on an island that I own, tanned and rested and alone
surrounded by enormous piles of money." -Flynn Rider, Tangled
  





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Sat Feb 25, 2023 7:47 pm
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KateHardy says...



\/Luna Lee Taylor\/


written with @winterwolf0100


Luna walked quietly behind Dwyn, trying to make as little noise as possible. She just had to do one thing during this and she was going to do it right and not be in the way. It was the best she could do. It was really all she could do. Stay out of Dwyn's way and remove the one blockade for her. Of course, Dwyn could probably steal the right key with just five extra minutes, but she was happy to be included. If it meant she didn't have to stay alone and got to be near Dwyn, even better. It was much safer that way. On her own Luna would be worse than a sitting duck.

They made their way to the elevator, Dwyn walking up ahead like she totally belonged in this building and Luna doing her best to match that. She was sure she only ended up looking constipated but luckily they didn't really run into anyone on the way there. Her only plan to avoid being questioned had been to dive behind Dwyn and act like the shy child with her aunt. It was a terrible plan given she looked much more like the terrified child being kidnapped and that was not the message she needed to give off.

"What are you doing with your face?" Dwyn glanced at her, frowning as they walked into the elevator. She hit the button for the sixteenth floor before the doors had even fully closed. Luna shrunk to the corner, staying out of sight in the shadows. If anyone walked into this on a different floor, it was the closest she could get to hiding. She startled when she heard Dwyn's voice.

"I. Uhh. Act. Acting Natural."

Dwyn raised an eyebrow. "If that's your natural, I'm extremely concerned," she said dryly.

The elevator started to move up, a song Luna didn't recognize playing quietly in the background. Luna shrunk a little further into the shadows. "Sorry. I'll work on it." Luna's current look of half terror, half anticipation for getting to unlock something was probably not going to inspire confidence in her abilities but it was all she could manage besides curling into a ball. That would look too suspicious if someone entered the elevator so she couldn't go for that.

"Didn't I already tell you to stop apologizing?" Dwyn asked, then added after a second, "But yes, you need to work on that."

"I...You. Did. So-I mean. Work. That. On. Do will I." Having completely lost her command of the English language, Luna settled for looking at the floor.

The number sixteen flashed and the doors opened with a pleasant ding. Luna breathed a sigh of relief. The worst part of getting in was over. The rest of the way through the fire stairs should be free of people unless they got really, really unlucky. They'd been unlucky enough this whole time to deserve a little luck, didn't they?

Dwyn walked out first, pushing past someone standing there without even a glance. Luna's eyes widened as she did her best to scuttle along, hoping against hope that the person was too distracted by Dwyn's push to notice little Luna sneaking along. At least from her time with Dwyn, Luna was pretty sure that had been Dwyn's intention. She didn't just randomly push people out of her path.

The walk to the fire stairs took them slightly longer than Luna would have liked, but thankfully it was nice and uneventful again, that one person being the only one they'd run into. Dwyn came a to a stop in front of the door.

Dwyn gestured to the door and said, "Well, do your thing."

Luna knelt down by the door, inspecting the lock for a moment. She put a hand on it, sensing what was behind it. Before she could fully get a picture of what might be inside it clicked and swung open. Luna tried not to think too hard on it. Her work had just happened slightly faster and she was absolutely not going to complain about it.

She quickly stepped aside, to let Dwyn pass.

"Not your worst work," Dwyn said, which seemed to be the closest she got to a compliment.

Dwyn made her way up the stairs as efficiently as ever, this time Luna letting herself hang back a little bit more once she shut the door. No one would be coming in after them unless for some reason an actual fire broke out. They'd been unlucky but surely it was mathematically impossible for those odds to work out against them.

They were soon at the door leading out the eighteenth floor. Dwyn came to a stop once again. This time she just looked at it expectantly. Luna walked up quickly, jogging a little to catch up the little gap that had formed. She placed her hand there and the door opened immediately, the now familiar lock immediately coming to her.

She shrank right back again, residing into the darkness that was now familiar. She was getting used to this. Staying out of the way. The less excited and jumpy she was, the better it was all going to be. This was perfect.

Dwyn said nothing, just walked quickly onto the eighteenth floor, walking right back to where the elevators and the central distribution unit as Conrad had called it would be. Luna hadn't really paid too much attention to it, knowing she wasn't going to be of any help there except to maybe look out for someone approaching.

Once again they didn't run into anyone and Luna thanked the stars. Dwyn seemed to have at least a half decent idea of what she was looking for because she immediately headed for one of the machines there, USB already out of her pocket and at the ready. Luna stayed as far away as she could without being too far away to whisper to, looking both ways to see if anyone was approaching.

So far, so good. It was hardly a minute before Dwyn was already walking away, having finished plugging in whatever that USB happened to be.

"Don't just stand there," Dwyn said nonchalantly, though her eyes kept glancing around them. "Come on."

Luna followed as Dwyn slipped right back into the fire stairs, Luna turning around to lock the door behind her. She once again stayed just a little further back as they walked down, Dwyn walking until she was just one floor above where they needed to be.

Another gentle push by Luna and that door was swinging open.

They were soon walking toward the elevator and... Luna gulped. Another person. This time she had enough warning to duck behind Dwyn. Luna also managed not to squeal. She was very proud of herself for that one. Luckily the person was only headed out the elevator and walked off in the opposite direction. Dwyn quickly slipped in and soon they were out at the floor they'd started off on and headed back to Conrad.
Stay Safe
The Princess of Darkness

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When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.
— Dean Jackson