ArchivedLogs:Holmes and Watson?
| Holmes and Watson? | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
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15 April, 2013 Jamie needs a favor. Doug makes a bad life decision. |
| Location | |
Tucked away in a run-down neighborhood in Brooklyn, this is a park, at least nominally. It's a playground; a sad rickety sort of jungle-gym connected to a splintery wooden castle by a rickety swaying rope-and-planks bridge. A pair of swings, chains rusting. A see-saw at one side of the mulch, one of its handles half broken off. The basketball court's asphalt is cracked and breaking up, and the hoops have long since lost their netting.
Alright so here is the premise of this meeting some time later. Jamie kept in contact with Doug mildly though it is clear that the detective is up to his eyeballs in work. In fact, when he decided to contact Doug one day over the phone it was to ask him for help. "Look, here's the deal. I need your help. I'm willing to pay you a cut of the proceeds if you do a hacking job for me. There is a CCTV DVR that I need to hack and it's honestly a little bit out of my depth, and I'm positive the footage of the cheaters I'm looking for is on it. It's skeezy and not strictly legal but I've hit a dead end and I have bills to pay. Can you help?" It probably wasn't the best idea to agree to help, Doug realizes, as he arrives at the pre-arranged spot -- a tiny little park that looks far more appropriate for a drug deal or the collecting (or payment) of shadowy debts. It certainly is a far cry from the suburban cheaters he'd expected to find. He quirks a grin as he finds a spot under a burned-out lamp post, and leans against it. What the fuck is he doing here? People get killed for smarter decisions than this. Still, here he is, dressed in a dark hoodie and black jeans, his laptop bag replaced with his battered backpack. As he settles in, he fishes out his phone, and types off a series of quick texts.
Jamie doesn't take long to appear, also in casual thuggery-accessible wear. He approaches Doug from afar so he can see him coming, though today he's wearing a big pair of aviators and gloves. "Thanks for coming out here," he says, as he reaches for Doug's hand for to shake. He pats the young man on the shoulder. "I realize you could have spent the evening on the marina yacht or shooting goals with your intramural soccer or whatever rather than come out here to ghettosville, so I appreciate it. This is going to help me pay rent today, so you're doing me a favor." He clears his throat, and points out towards a parking lot on the other side of the street. "Right there, see it? That camera over the edge of the roof there. These things have a DVR recorder that I /believe/ can be cracked without too much effort. I just want to trawl the network for footage on the day in question." Doug shakes the older man's hand with a grimace. "I didn't have anything planned,' he admits. "Nothing pressing, anyway." He reaches out to poke a gentle punch at Jamie's shoulder. "And it's too early for yachting," he says. "Regattas start next month." He shifts his backpack around as he looks at the indicated camera, frowning mildly. "That's a private lot, right? Shouldn't be too much of a problem." He squats, placing his backpack on the ground and pulling out a pair of co-axial cables that he loops around his hand. "The biggest issue is finding the network box," he says. "The camera only sends information; it doesn't get any signals other than positioning commands." He nods at the roof. "I need to get up there, to the box." Jamie screws up his lips a little as he eyeballs the roof, his brows knitting in thought. He taps his finger on his lip a couple of times, tilts his head. "I don't think that's going to be a problem, Doug." As he speaks, a Jamie steps out from essentially behind him, this one soon clearly becoming a lookout up and down the street. It's dark and there's never much traffic in this part of the city, very few people even out on the street. One granny is up a couple of blocks on a walker. Jamie hustles over to the alley next to the building on the other side, walking quickly. He gives Doug a cheeky thumbs up, and in what seems to be a couple of seconds, a bunch of Jamies are creating a human pyramid on top of each other's shoulders. Up, up, up...wobbling, wobbling, and then finally Jamie has got a handhold. The rest of the Jamies seem to step in like a ladder up into original Jamie, who pulls himself up to the roof. He begins to pose vainly, like a grecian god. Lookout Jamie nearby gestures with a thumb over to the alley, for Doug. "If you head over there we'll pull you up the same way. We just don't want to keep the crowd out for longer than a few moments." "It attracts attention," he adds glibly, eyeballing the granny up the street. Doug watches the pyramid build with a mix of fascination and horror, blinking as Jamie upon Jamie stacks up, and then....folds up. And he frankly STARES at the sudden muscle show. It takes a minute for him to remember to grab the tablet and a couple of other things, and move them to the top of the bag. Lookout Jamie gets a snort of dry laughter. "I can't imagine /why/," he drawls, and lopes over to the wall, peering up at Jamie with a critical frown. "That was frankly bizarre," he says in a voice just loud enough to reach the roof. "I'm afraid to ask how you do it to get back down. You just start dropping Jamies off the roof until they make a pile?" Lookout Jamie gives Doug an even squint with raised brows, his lips a little thin, following Doug in his wake. Apparently, the granny up the street has not noticed them yet. "/No/," he says reproachfully, in a hushed voice. More Jamies begin to pop out of lookout Jamie, one of the emerging multiple men popping out at a point where he shoulders Doug mildly. "Oops, sorry." They start to create a new pile, and then suddenly, there's pushing at Doug's back, fingers under his feet, hands pulling on his wrists. In frightening coordination they begin to assist his ascent up the human pyramid without much warning or prep at all. "Oh, my god," Doug whispers as he's hauled roof-wards, watching the pavement get further away. "Vertical crowd-surfing kind of rocks." He has the good sense to go limp, allowing the Jamies to bring him to the roof, where he's set (surprisingly) on his feet. "Usually, I don't let my dates get that handsy this early," he quips as he looks around the roof, bringing his crinkled gaze back to the older man with a lop-sided grin. "You must be something special." He offers a wink in the low light before moving to inspect the back of the camera, and the two cables coming from the back. Jamie rolls his eyes good-naturedly at Doug's quips, looking over the side of the building and putting his hands on his hips. The rest of him has once again been absorbed. For some reason now, his fascination with yon granny is everlasting. "Where did you pick up this kind of skill, kid? I can hardly believe someone your age knows how to fuck around with this. Do you have uh, one of those, uh...eidetic memories, or whatever?" Doug makes a humming noise as he inspects the cables, tracking them down to the surface of the roof and beginning to follow them. "Well, there's a reason I was at Evolve," he says, looking over his shoulder. "I've got my own mutant thing. I'm a polyglot." He waves a hand at his head. "Any kind of language, I understand and speak it, once I've heard or read it. Including computer languages." He smiles, a flash of white teeth in the shadows he's disappearing into. "Also, I watch a lot of MacGuyver re-runs." There's noise of a backpack being opened, and then the white glow of the tablet screen illuminates Doug's face. He's near a small greyish box where the cables disappear, and he's frowning at the lock. "Might be a minute," he murmurs, fishing a paper clip from his pocket and pulling it into a straight piece of wire. "Maybe two." Jamie is the sort who can always amuse himself and excels at it when he knows almost nobody is watching. In fact, he is sort of juvenile with it. After a moment or two of humming while Doug is kneeled next to the camera cable array, he spawns another version of him, and begins to do faux kung-fu, the kind you practice on the school yard. Another one appears to actually watch over the side of the building, since ONE of them has to be serious around here. If the blonde at the network box is paying attention to the kung-fu, he's not showing it. Doug is not a lockpick, by any stretch of the imagination, and he needs to concentrate on the task at hand. It is a good ten, anxious minutes before he makes a noise of success, the lock turning under the now-corkscrewed paper clip. "Jesus, how does MacGuyver make it look so easy?" he mutters under his breath. "God help me if I have to make an explosive out of bubble gum and rubber bands." He eases the box open, and tilts his tablet to illuminate the interior. "Okay, this looks pretty straightforward," he says, peering at the circuitry. He begins to hook cables to his tablet, checking the screen every now and then to make sure he's not inadvertantly frying the thing. He pulls out another small device, which the coaxials get plugged into, that has a small, thin wire with a male jack end. This gets slipped into a small hole on the panel, and Doug grins. "Gimme a minute, and I'll be in. Then I can grab what you're needing." He wrinkles his nose, tapping at the screen. "What made you call me?" he asks, then, taking advantage of the quiet moment. "Surely a world-class dick such as yourself has tech connections." Jamie stops messing around for a moment, and after a set of silent seconds, Kung Fu Jamie 1 absorbs Kung Fu Jamie 2 with the halfest-ass karate chop. It is a very deliberate and somber sort of thing. Lookout Jamie is still diligently looking around behind them, but Madrox Classic paces over idly towards Doug, his shoes crunching roof gravel. " I could probably have read up on how to do it myself, but I wanted to see how you'd pull this off. If you'd bother. Reading you back in the cafe, you struck me as the kind of guy who wants to get into trouble deep-down. Soccer's fine. University is fine. Video games and nerding it up is fine." With a deep breath, Madrox looks over his shoulder towards the other side of the building, his arms folded across his chest. "But you know that there's something about getting up to the real shit, even if it's this sort of garbage that is completely beneath you, that excites guys like you and me. You don't want to be sitting in your little narrow cage. It's easy to. Sometimes it's nice to. But I think you know that you're bigger than that and sometimes you just want to spread your arms. You just need an outlet, right?" Doug is quiet a long moment after Jamie's explanation. Maybe he's thinking about what was said; maybe he's busy studying his tablet screen, fingers skimming over the surface lightning-quick. "I guess that's pretty fair to say," he says, finally, looking up at Jamie. "I have to admit, this beats the hell out of a pep rally or LAN party." He flexes his fingers with a popping sound. "And I am having fun," he adds. "I like computer stuff, but I also like getting out and getting my hands dirty." He wrinkles his nose at the screen. "Oh. Well. That's interesting." "...Yeah?" Jamie asks impatiently after a moment of waiting, his eyebrows raising on his forehead. He leans over Doug's shoulder to eyeball the tablet. Doug's back stiffens just a bit as Jamie leans in, and the slow inhale is just him breathing. Really. It's not him /smelling/ the older man, because that would be creepy and workplace-inappropriate. So it's breathing. "This system. The firewalls are pretty lousy, but the OS is a complete bad-ass Frankenstein." He gestures at the screen, which is filled with numbers, letters, equations, half-sentences. Gibberish, really. "It's going to take me a minute to find the files we want." He falls silent, then, his eyes glazing over a bit as his fingers skim faster, pausing every now and then before erupting in another flurry. Jamie stands up straight after watching for a little longer. He scratches his head and starts to pace. This is his "I'm A Detective, I Swear" pace. "That's odd," he murmurs, scritching behind his own ear for a moment. When he thinks and when he's comfortable, other Madroxes sometimes pace, they slide in, they get absorbed. Sometimes they lay forehead against one another to put their brains together, other times he'll do frankly bizarre things, like step over a lying-prone Jamie or traipse across his own stomach before absorbing the errant one. This is otherwise known as Madrox Mayhem (tm). "This guy the wife is cheating with is supposed to be an auto mechanic. It doesn't really jibe that he'd have a decent system to hack at all. This closed circuit tv rig should be a dime store affair, Doug." Doug doesn't respond, for a moment. He's busy communicating, and the corner of his mouth comes up in a wicked little grin. "Oh, you stupid little shit," he says. "It's his kid," he answers the question. "This is totally something his kid, or one of his nieces or nephews set up." He looks away from the tablet, somehow finding Madrox Prime and landing his gaze on /that/ one. "I recognize what he's done, now. He's --" what follows is a complicated explanation of computer languages and their manglings and forced compatability that is probably lost on Jamie and not really worth going into in this narrative. Finally, he pauses to take a breath. "It's a knot, but now that I know the layout, I know which programs I need to talk to." He holds up two fingers. "Two minutes." At that moment, Doug's tablet flickers, and dies, a skull and crossbones coming up briefly before the screen goes blank. A moment later, the buliding and the parking lot go dark, the lights blinking out. Doug make a dry humming noise. "Maybe longer." All of the Madroxes sit up or stand up straight, tilting their heads and looking out into the sky thoughtfully as the lights dim. He clicks his tongue once, and then they all regroup into a single Jamie again, now a very purposeful sort of detective. One fist claps into an open palm, decisive. "I knew it. God, speaking of knots. This is turning out to be a very complicated, very incestuous, and very illegal affair, Mr. Ramsey. For a while I thought that my client's wife was cheating on him with the auto mechanic and his fifteen year old son just knew about it. Jesus, this belongs on fucking Maury, kid - this guy is /paying/ my client's wife to sleep with his son." Eventually, though, he has to acknowledge that they're all completely with the lights out. "I need proof. Look, this kid is a geek like you, right? I saw a picture with his shirt once, it was one of those cutesy internet-order affairs with zeroes and ones all over it. There's probably...an administrator password, or something along those lines, right? I'm going to go down to the breaker and throw it to get the lights back on, just try putting in the name "Angela" in binary and see what that nets us." Jamie disappears over the side of the building down the fire escape ladder, metal plinking. A couple of moments later, there's some rustling down from the alley. A couple of moment's more, and the power is back. Doug makes a face in the low light, clearly disgusted with this new twist. "That is...messed up," he agrees. "I'm not even sure this belongs on Maury. It's more like Dateline sort of stuff." He nods when Jamie heads for the edge of the roof, and grimaces as he puts his now-dead tablet in his backpack, and pulls out a smaller version. "Man, I loved that guy," he says a bit mournfully to the air as he plugs the cables in. "He was a real trooper." He skims his fingers over the screen, opening his working window. He hums tunelessly as he works his way back in, his eyes beginning to glaze over as he makes contact. He doesn't notice when the lights go on, wrapped up in his work as he is. Unfortunately, he also does not see the skinny teenager with a baseball bat creeping up behind him, the soft thunk of the rooftop door too soft to alert the blonde. The kid's arms shake, and his steps are clumsy as they scrape along the tarred concrete, but he is very intent on his target. Now that the ladder has been dropped down, there's no human pyramiding required to get back up. So the metal plink of hands on rungs is the first hint that Jamie's on his way back up. Things are coming to a head, one way or another here. "Oh, there we go," Doug says, when the system begins to respond to his new invasion, and he skims fingers over the screen, pulling out the video files and copying them. The metal plink gets a grin, and Doug begins to turn to greet Jamie. "Hey, Madrox, I found what we were -- holyfuckingjesus." Doug rolls out of the way of the suddenly descending bat, curling around the tablet protectively. "Shit! Madrox!" The kid lifts the bat with a savage sort of sound, bringing it down again with just as much force. This time he finds Doug's thigh, connecting solidly and evoking a howl from Doug that's choked off between clenched teeth. "Think you're going to come in here and fuck up /my/ good thing?" the kid snarls, raising the bat again. "Angela is /mine/, motherfucker. My dad /said/ so." The bat comes down again, barely missing Doug as he rolls away again. "Madrox!" Doug calls, his voice strained with effort and the pain in his thigh. "Could use a little help up here!" Just as the bat is about to swing for Doug's head, a hand rests on it with a wooden sound, holding it back. Two hands. Three hands. "Shit. Sorry, Doug." Four, five, six all wrench it away in an almost cruel manner, spinning him around and putting the kid flat on his ass. As many as ten Madroxes are crowding that roof now, some with their hands in their pockets, one of them clapping the bat into his open hand rhythmically. "I thought you were a pitcher in Little League, Chip?" he asks intimidatingly. Pat. Pat. Pat. "I brought my team for the big game. Where's yours?" Doug rolls away one last time when Madrox appears, coming to his knees and checking the tablet. Miraculously, all the cables are still attached, and there's a soft ping indicating the files are finished copying. "Got it," the blonde says to Jamie, wincing a bit as he stands and begins to disconnect the cables. "Damn. That's going to leave a big bruise," he says as he rubs at his thigh, glaring at the kid. "Idiot." The kid looks startled when Madrox stops him, and when he spins and lands on his butt, he GLARES up at the man. Men. Many men. The kid's eyes widen as he looks over the assembly, and his jaw tightens. "It's not fair," he whines, wetness coming into his eyes. "My dad said Angela was /mine/. She said she /loves/ me." He scrubs a hand over his face, thoroughly defeated at this suddenly Adult Situation. "She said her husband didn't want her no more, and we could run away together." He looks up, eyes shining with anger and pain. "She /promised/." "Part of growing up is learning that pillow talk doesn't mean anything, chief," Jamie mutters with a roll of his eyes, tossing the bat over the side of the roof. One of the Madrox Multitude muscles past the kid and takes a knee next to Doug. "You all right, man? Where did he get you?" Doug groans as he uses the shoulder of the Madrox to steady himself. "I'm okay," he says, rubbing the spot gingerly. "He caught me across the thigh, but it doesn't feel broken. Feels like I took a good kick." He grins warmly at the Madrox handy, and holds up the tablet. "But, mission accomplished, so good on us, right?" He winces as he shifts to walk towards Chip, shaking his head. "Just go find a cheerleader," he says helpfully, pressing his mouth into a tight line. "You'll be much happier." Chip does not respond to this. He doesn't even look up, now. He just sits there, bottom lip jutted out as he scrubs at his face. Doug leans down, and smiles tightly into the side of the kid's face. "Also, you owe me a tablet, if I can't get mine back up. My friends here will be more than happy to arrange a convenient time to pick that up." He grins at Jamie as he stands and slides his tablet back into his backpack. "We done, here? 'Cause I could totally wreck a White Castle, right now." "Let's go get some burgers and call Child Protective Services. You've earned some greasy sliders," Jamie says, as a group in complete synch, in the most unnerving manner possible. Mission Accomplished? | |
