Ryan nods and sighs.
He asks the Son here,
"Parole... Yes. When's the soonest I can meet one or two of them in person, out of whatever passes for jail here? And where's, say, the nearest medical school in the mid to lower levels?"
He then directs towards Dester,
"Well, I suppose it'll be an honor working with you, Dester. As much as I miss actual surgery, I think I'm going to become... Quite tired of it quite soon, and I know I don't want to be stuck here the rest of my days performing the same surgery on everyone.
Anyway, I suppose it's time to do some serious information gathering."
Join Dester's plan of "off-duty" time at Alpha. Even though there really is no "off-duty". And we have an allowance, yeah? Pick up some local whatever-passes-for-newspapers and scour the news for information on the criminal world or civil unrest - maybe we can play an asylum route.
...On that note, should I even bother with the organ-harvesting bit? What's the long-term funding like?
"I'm not sure off the top of my head, I don't track such things. But I can look into it."
You head back up to alpha. Seems to be getting late juding by the fact that many of the stores are closing. Head into one shop to buy a newspaper and find that the only ones they're selling are in a language you don't understand. Wonderful.
As per organ sales, I don't think it would really be worth it. Steve is essentially making you money out of thin air by manipulating bank accounts so getting the odd few thousand dollars here and there isn't worth the risk unless you want to use that sale to build ties to the underworld.
We don't have a TV in beta. It's a warehouse. No cable.
I knew that.
mealtimes and sleeptime and off duty time is to be spent at Alpha, or in the Strip around Alpha. No point sleeping on the floor of a warehouse. While at Alpha, watch local news and political gossip channels, eat in the restaurant, and occasionally visit other stores and do light shopping (provided I can get some walking around money from the Sons). Otherwise, continue with the plan. Await developments. Be ready for eventual time skip.
An honor? It will certainly be an experience. Here's to a profitable enterprise and interesting times. Hopefully mostly interesting for the other guys, as the New Chinese used to say.
((Gentlefish, PW has already mentioned that wireless communications in the stacks are pretty much nonexistent over any significant distance. If we are in the same building, they will probably function, otherwise, they need a land line connection.))
You head back to alpha, steal some food from the kitchen of the restaurant it has as its front, and then sit down to watch tv. The sons have selected a rather nice recliner and large flat screen for this place. Admittedly they're just kinda sitting there in an empty room with nothing around them, but whatever, the finer points of home decoration can come later.
The news you get here is, well there are several stations. The "Local" news, ie the one that seems to be made somewhere around here, is in a language you don't speak, subtitled in 3 languages you don't speak. Hm. You click through several more channels till you find one that does have a language you understand It seems to be a news broadcast from higher up the stack. It is unfortunately very banal and mostly fluff pieces. The only things of note that you learn are that crime is apparently slowly decreasing, there's tension among "Foreigners" from the newest batch of temporary immigration, and that there's increasing food shortages in the lower stack.
Whatcha wanna buy, exactly?
"Thank you for the help. Should I head back here or to Beta when I'm done? After the son responds, head out and find a restaurant nearby, but not right next to the warehouse. Once there look at the menu
Go with Vincent. Try to listen in on any speaking, verbal tics in the language and such. Also look at the menu.
"Head back to alpha." *Assuming thats the one in the strip*
You both head back down the street until you find a restaurant that appears to be both busy enough to see a lot of people, but also with open seats. The name of the place appears to be gibberish: it's written in fancy text and you can only make out a "La" at the front and a "shibasho" at the end. You've got no goddamn clue what they serve. Luckily they have a menu framed out front. Even then you don't recognize half of it, a lot of names and dishes that you've never heard of. They don't sound half bad, judging from what you can understand, but they're very expensive. You wonder, idly, how much money is on this card.
You get a table for two, near the back, and order two of the most understandable thing, which you're pretty sure is a sandwich of some variety. As you wait for it to come, you listen to the speech patterns. There seems to be a common thread of Hyperbole and flowery speech. Almost as though they're all trying to one up each other both in terms of their stories and the words they use to tell them.
Reestablish visual contact, smoke fuckers with mind.
You walk back out into the hall and find that reestablishing visual contact is gonna be difficult. Mostly because of all the fire and smoke blocking your vision of anything.
Huh...might have over done it there...
"Say son, you think if we ended up setting some kind of construction project up here at delta that we could sneak in some weapons and get them hidden during construction? If the worst happens then having another place to stock up, or a backup plan here would be nice."
Ask the Son if we can manage to move a small cache of weapons into delta by disguising the shipment as some kind of construction work there.
"We can just mail them there, As long as we're talking a box full, not a chest full or truck full."
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Topic: Mission 23: Thing that Goes Bump in the Night (Read 55055 times)