Realistic or Modern The Shipyard

[Reine]

@Quarantine Is "Daniel" supposed to be David? You've said Daniel a few times now and I don't remember seeing a Daniel in play. Or am I just completely oblivious?

THIS IS A CULTURE SHOCK. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's David, now that you mention it.

 

[Kade]

Lol, okay. I was sort of scrambling around, looking at character sheets and past posts and thinking I was going crazy. I'm like, "What did I miss????"

 

[Nyxione]

xD I've always assummed it was David whenever @Quarantine wrote in Daniel. I was thinking that the name might've stuck after Quara read through David's cs. Daniel was his younger brother and was mentioned quite a number of times in his sheet after all.

 

[Reine]

xD I've always assummed it was David whenever @Quarantine wrote in Daniel. I was thinking that the name might've stuck after Quara read through David's cs. Daniel was his younger brother and was mentioned quite a number of times in his sheet after all.

D: Is Quara becoming a thing now? I don't know how to feel about this. Halp.

 

[Kade]

Lol, was looking through more art for my posts. Role play goals, right here:

Look how badass he looks! This could totally happen. Maybe. Like when he's not such a spazz, lol.

 

[Nyxione]

WOOOH! Exam is done~ (Literally just got out of the exam room). I can write posts again

D: Is Quara becoming a thing now? I don't know how to feel about this. Halp.

Yes. Yes is a thing now, Quara ~ xD jk.


If you don't like it, we can always call you something else. What would you prefer?

Lol, was looking through more art for my posts. Role play goals, right here:

Look how badass he looks! This could totally happen. Maybe. Like when he's not such a spazz, lol.

Do I smell a character development brewing? I think I do ~ Maybe something could happen later on to bring out his inner badass xD

 

[Kade]

I'm always brewing character development, lol. I just wrote a lil short story of a case Switch was on pre-Black Cat. Because no one's seen what he does yet. I need to edit it, then I'll put it...somewhere, lol.

 

[Nyxione]

Ooh. Interestinggg. I look forward to seeing it c:

 

[amended]

Switch being a badass sounds amazing. Also, @ZebraWolf still waiting for an Erika post.

 

[Kade]

Idk where to stick this, lol. Here. Have a Switch story. When he's in his element....sort of. Or problem solving in a way that can put him back in his element.

Good on Paper

"God, chill out, it's just a dog," Switch huffed as he piloted his little hovercraft (he lovingly called her Harley after Harley Quinn) into place, watching her movements through his laptop via her mounted camera feed.


"It's a big dog. With lots of teeth," Marks muttered back, his camera feed showing him around the corner and nearly a block away from the property the dog was protecting. What a fucking pansy. He probably could've brought a steak with him and that would've satisfied the little pit bull just fine, but noooo, just because she looked scary to him, he'd instead insisted on tranquing the poor thing. As if that wasn't bad enough, the guy was afraid to do it himself, so that left Switch having to figure out how to mount a small, remote-triggered pressure gun underneath Harley's base, and then do some thorough research on exactly what and how much he could shoot the dog up with to make sure she'd wake up okay. Killing animals was not something that was in his contract after all.


This gig was so dumb to begin with. He was hired to "help extract information" on a one Carl Stevenson, some low level schmuck working for a medical technology firm who was supposedly trading company secrets with competitors. It sounded great on the surface--do a little digging, hack into a few accounts, expose any emails or catch him meeting with the enemy on some street camera somewhere, and boom, that nice paycheck was his--but then it turned out that the guy didn't use much technology as a rule. No emails, no Facebook, no online bank management, no porn websites; the guy didn't even have cable!


After much public security cam stalking, Switch was finally able to figure out that Stevenson was doing all his communication on paper, dropping messages into strategic locations that would be picked up by various other people practically the moment after he made the delivery. He had hoped the stills and video captures he'd taken would be enough to satisfy the client as proof that he was up to something shady, but nooooo, the client said they needed more. Stevenson involved in something suspicious wasn't grounds to press charges; before they could act, they had to know for sure that the suspicious thing he was involved in was trading company secrets.


That made sense, he guessed, but the problem was that Switch didn't exactly work in paper, but it was too late to back out of his contract by that point. What he could do was get some bugs and cams inside the house in hopes that Stevenson might reveal how he was making contact with these people to set up the drops, and hopefully say something about the nature of his business in the process, but Switch wasn't exactly the breaking-and-entering type. He could disarm any security system set in place, sure, but somebody else had to do the whole lock picking thing; just because he understood how the inside of a tumbler lock worked didn't mean he had the skillset to make one open.


There was also the matter that he might have flipped himself over a curb on his skateboard the week before while trying not to run over a cat that darted into the street, and he'd kind of fucked up his ankle in the process. Go figure. He couldn't even do his own field work at the moment (he would not be mentioning this on his resume to Black Cat).


Enter Marks. Marks was not one of Switch's contacts. He was sent in by the client to offer extra assistance, and was probably somebody's cousin or something. Maybe second cousin. He could crack locks, sure, but he was an anxious sort of guy and the fact that he wouldn't even go near a dog took him out of the running for any sort of professional thief. The only good thing about having him provided to Switch was that it meant he didn't have to do a bunch of research tracking somebody else down and then doing more research to vet them out. He was able to take that time to order the necessary bugs off the black market, and then modify them so they'd work even better for his purposes.


And that left him here, steering Harley the Hovercraft from the safety of his tiny apartment, his ankle propped up on a pillow, trying to shoot a dog in the flank with a tranq dart so Marks could take all his little bug babies and plant them in various stations around Stevenson's home. Carefully lining up his shot behind the sleeping canine, he pulled the joystick trigger and winced as the dog yelped and jumped to her feet, snapping at her hindquarters as if a bee had stung her...which wasn't too far from the truth. Switch pulled up on his stick so Harley would be well out of reach of angry teeth, and waited just a couple minutes before the dog collapsed back to the ground.


"Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay," Switch muttered as he lowered the hovercraft pretty much right in front of the dog's face, making sure she was breathing normally. She seemed alright; he'd check on her again later just to make sure. If there was even a sign that anything was amiss, he was calling animal control over. The job could fuck itself.


Sighing, he glanced back over to Marks' camera feed, seeing the guy still in the same spot. "You can go now," he coaxed.


"You're sure?"


"Yes, I'm sure. Go!"


He watched as Marks shuffled around the corner and scurried--yeah, an actual scurry--towards the back gate. Switch had to give him credit, he had the padlock on it undone in only a couple seconds, pushing open the gate and walking in a wide berth around the sleeping dog. The back door wasn't problematic for him either, except when the subtle beep of a timed alarm went off the second Marks stepped inside.


Switch piloted Harley in behind him, swinging her around the entryway until he caught sight of the box.


"Hey, over here," he called through the hovercraft's speaker as opposed to using the commlink in Marks' ear, turning himself into an actual presence in the room. "I know this system. You have to work fast, and don't fuck up."


"Okay," Marks said, and continued to just stand there.


"Get out your tools, oh my god!" Switch barked.


After a little fumbling and a little more snapping on Switch's end, Marks was able to disable the alarm, leaving both of them a little rattled. Switch wasn't the one whose freedom was on the line here--Marks would go to jail if he were caught for sure--but still, his pride was at stake. It'd look really bad on his record if he got one of his teammates arrested, even if it was someone he hadn't particularly wanted to work with.


"Okay," Switch breathed, still speaking as essentially Harley. "We're going to go through the house and look for good places to plant the bugs. Don't touch anything until I tell you to. And keep your eyes peeled for any evidence."


Marks, thankfully, listened, following after Switch's little drone, and actually being somewhat useful in suggesting where the bugs could be hidden since he had a much broader view of the rooms. They worked through the bottom floor without finding anything incriminating, Switch "flew out" to check on the dog again, then they started making their way around the top floor.


"Oh. Safe," Marks suddenly said, making Switch spin his drone around.


"What?"


"That painting right there, it's hiding a safe."


Marks pointed at a small scenic painting of a lake and some trees, one that matched another painting on the other end of the room. There wasn't anything weird about it that Switch could discern, at least not at first glance.


"How do you know?"


"Because of the way the room is arranged," Marks explained, sounding a little proud to be the one with the information for once. "The closet was built into this wall in the room on the other side right where this bookshelf is, almost centered. Stevenson chose to put the bookshelf in the middle of the room and put the painting in the back corner where you can't really see the art when you're going in and out, which defeats the purpose of having art. Normally you'd put the shelf in the corner and hang the painting in the center, but you can't do that if you're trying to hide a safe built into the wall next to the hollow of the closet. I'm telling you, it's a safe."


And just to be an ass and prove himself, he strolled right over and grabbed the painting off the wall just as Switch was telling him to stop.


Yep, for a guy who didn't use much tech, Stevenson certainly didn't mind rigging up his home to protect it against intruders.


"Oh shit," Marks spouted off as a loud siren blared.


"Yeah, no shit! I told you not to touch anything unless I said so!" Switch yelled.


He set Harley to hover in place as his fingers flew across two different keyboards, working to track where the alarm signal was traveling to.


"Should I run?" Marks asked dumbly.


"No," Switch replied in a distracted tone as his eyes scanned the codes popping up on his screens. "Open the safe."


He didn't look to see if Marks was doing as told, but the guy didn't argue and it didn't sound like he was running, so Switch just had to trust that he was following orders.


The alarm system - a Volchitsa unit, Russian owned - sent the signal almost instantly to the actual system in Russia, their operators working quickly to pin down the account of the registered signal so they could contact the owner of the property in case of user error.


"Bingo," Switch mumbled, letting all that play through. Stevenson's regular phone line, the one the front door alarm had been rigged to, was clean as a whistle, taking no calls that hadn't been from friends, family, coworkers, or the Chinese food delivery guy. This phone line, however, the ones the Russians were contacting, was completely different, registered under an alias with a number that was in a completely different state.


Now having that number at his disposal, he intercepted the call well before Stevenson could even think to pick it up, and swiveled over to his other keyboard where he could access his stash of previously recorded (super boring) calls Stevenson had previously had with said whistle-clean people. He ran his software for vocal inflection, one in which he could simply type whatever it was that he wanted to say and his program would pull the matching words out of the conversations, stringing them together in a way that wouldn't sound too unnatural to normal human speech.


"Hello?" Switch typed out, and listened as it immediately transferred into Stevenson's voice on the phone line connected to the Volchitsa end.


"Ah, hello Mr. Jordan," the Russian operative answered. Her accent was sweet. Switch hoped she was hot. He was going to imagine that she was. "We are getting a trigger on your in-home alarm."


Switch's fingers danced to their own tune as he quickly typed out a response, being careful to use words that would've come up frequently in Stevenson's everyday conversations. He didn't want to accidentally stumble into a word that didn't have a vocal recording. The auto-voice would kick in if he did, and wouldn't that just freak out the poor lady? "Yes, sorry. I'm home. Just getting things done. The picture fell. I forgot the number to turn it off."


"Not a problem, Mr. Jordan. I can help you with that," the Russian replied in her perky, sexy Russian voice. "How is your day?"


"Good. It's..." Switch looked up the area code for the phone number Stevenson was using and did a quick check on the weather there. "...raining. I like the rain."





"Me too. It helps me to sleep at night." Switch smiled at the response as he listened to the lady tapping out keys on her board. A second later, the alarm went silent in the house. "There you are, Mr. Jordan. Would you like me to text you the code so you have it for next time?"


The widest grin spread across Switch's face. This was his lucky day. "Yes. Please. Thank you. Goodbye."





He closed the link on the phone line and set his systems to alert him if anyone was on it again, then promptly intercepted and wiped the text before it could actually reach Stevenson's phone, keeping the alarm code saved in his files for later use. With that crisis averted, he finally swung back to Marks' camera feed to check in on the whole safe cracking progress.


"How's it going?" he asked.


"Shhhhh," Marks hissed. "Almost got it. Had a little trouble with the alarm blaring in my head, but if everything stays quiet, I can get it. Can't believe this guy has alarms hiding an antique. Nuts."


Switch couldn't agree more with the assessment of Stevenson's character, waiting patiently until Marks let out a victory sound and yanked the safe open. Inside there was money, a lot of fucking money, all in cash, and a packet of clipped-together papers.


"Let me see," Switch instructed, and waited as Marks held the sheets up to his cam.


"This make any sense to you?" Marks asked, pondering over the stream of seeming nonsense scribbled on the pages, bits of what looked like poetry and movie quotes and lines from classic books strung together.


"Hmm, code, obviously," Switch deduced. "Hold up the pages one at a time. I'm going to take snapshots and run it through my encryption programs, see if they can pull anything out of it. It might also be a series of spoken code--you know, the whole one person says one line, the other person says another sort of deal? It might be how Stevenson communicates with his contacts."


"Weird."


"I know," Switch smiled. "Some of the stuff you see in the movies is actually true."


They didn't find anything else, but between the bugs they'd implanted and the secret phone line Switch was now able to monitor at will, it wasn't long before Switch was gathering all sorts of evidence on his target. The written paper code, as it turned out, was more than just a password sort of deal, more like it's own made up language that was actually sort of a challenge for Switch to decipher. Talk about one elaborate cryptogram puzzle! He'd always liked puzzles though, so that part was actually kind of fun trying to work his way through.


But what was more fun than solving puzzles and hacking codes? Taking a bonus for having to do a job that was technically outside his job description and being forced to work with a guy who almost ruined his street cred. During the time it took for Switch to gather all his intel on Stevenson, he also took the time to find his own professional thief, someone who was all too happy to buy a nice puppy some expensive steak and who had a little more sense about alarms. Right before Switch turned all his evidence over to the client, he had his guy go into the house a second time to gather up all the planted tech and take one more crack at the safe, easily shutting off the alarm thanks to the text the nice Russian had sent him.


Now Switch wasn't a greedy kid, not by any means, but it didn't mean he liked being taken advantage of. All this cash in the safe was probably going to go back to the client company in recompense of any funds they'd lost thanks to Stevenson selling out their secrets. If he took a small cut of that (like, a measly two grand cut), no one would notice. Besides, after paying the thief half of it for doing all the groundwork, and then sending a chunk off to the foster agency that took in the dog, it really only left him with about seven hundred. That was okay. He still had his hefty payoff from the client, his rep was still intact, and he had enough bonus cash to buy himself a shiny new skateboard (that he wouldn't be able to ride until his ankle healed, but he could be patient).


Really, he didn't have too much to complain about. At least he knew now he could work under a whole different type of pressure than just battling it out with other hackers.


"I really should be in Black Cat," he decided for the millionth time. One day he would be, then he wouldn't have to steal his own bonuses. Only two hundred, sixty-seven days left until his birthday. Then he'd try again. With this case under his wing, they would have to let him in. He couldn't wait.

~The End~

​

 

[Kade]

@too much idea Isn't Dio in the other car? Because Jess's car is already off and on the road by the time David and Switch are talking.

 

[yoikes]

@too much idea Isn't Dio in the other car? Because Jess's car is already off and on the road by the time David and Switch are talking.

He haven't entered the car, and i assume that the Rolls Royce is parked nearby so he could hear their conversation

 

[Kade]

Yeah, our car is already moving when David and Switch are talking, as in it's already left.

 

[yoikes]

Yeah, our car is already moving when David and Switch are talking, as in it's already left.

Whoops, my bad- I misread it, fixing it right away

 

[Kade]

[QUOTE="too much idea]Whoops, my bad- I misread it, fixing it right away

[/QUOTE]
All good. I miss some things sometimes too, but generally I have a good eye for smaller details; and as much as I would love to have Switch chattering with Dio, sadly it's not time yet.

 

[yoikes]

All good. I miss some things sometimes too, but generally I have a good eye for smaller details; and as much as I would love to have Switch chattering with Dio, sadly it's not time yet.

Soon probably

 

[Kade]

LMAO! I'm ready to watch this ship war. *grabs popcorn*

 

[amended]

@Kade this is going down like WW2.

 

[Kade]

Yes, I do totally have a plan for what Switch is doing, but if I typed it all out at once it'd be way too long. Plus, I realized he might need some assistance. @Quarantine, since Ria is also decently tech savvy, if you want I could PM you about what's going down so Ria can pick up on it and help out asap without being as in the dark as the non-tech characters. I feel like she'd get it pretty quickly.

 

[Reine]

Yes, I do totally have a plan for what Switch is doing, but if I typed it all out at once it'd be way too long. Plus, I realized he might need some assistance. @Quarantine, since Ria is also decently tech savvy, if you want I could PM you about what's going down so Ria can pick up on it and help out asap without being as in the dark as the non-tech characters. I feel like she'd get it pretty quickly.

Sure.

 

[Nyxione]

Has everyone in the other car broken their sim cards? If yes, how will Jess tell them where they'll be heading to? :'D

 

[Aes]

Has everyone in the other car broken their sim cards? If yes, how will Jess tell them where they'll be heading to? :'D

Ooh, I was thinking about this when I wrote Charlotte's but then I just made her break hers too I think phones can still work without the SIM card if they connect to wifi. Also, I don't think Mira has broken hers yet and I guess they could always stop somewhere and use a payphone/borrow a phone to call Jess.

 

[Kade]

Yes, wifi will work without a SIM card, so if they're using an online communication thread (email, secret forum, something like Line or Slack), they can totally still contact each other.

 

[Reine]

^^' Jess has a Burner phone.

 

[Kade]

^^' Jess has a Burner phone.

Or that, lol. That totally works.