Despite kinda promising myself that I’d start having a normal sleep schedule, I had Cleo wake me up around four. In my defense, I went to sleep early and MGs need less sleep anyway. Apparently. I also had a good reason: it’s easier to sneak around when people aren’t awake. That meant I could save experience by not taking any stealth perks. Yet.
I was slightly concerned that Carlos or someone would be assigned to make sure I stay out of trouble, but from my close survey of all ten people I saw in and on my way to the dinning hall, none were following me. In accordance with Cleo’s suggestion last night, I practiced noticing and avoiding cameras on my way there- made steadily easier by my growing familiarity with my new sight. As of now, I could fairly comfortably walk while moving my focused perception around, but If anything moved too quickly near me, I’d instantly snap back to myself. Not too much of an issue, but something that would be nice to fully control.
The reason I was being so careful was that I was planning on testing the RFID frequency I copied yesterday. The worst case scenario if I got caught would probably be a slap on the wrist, but that would make further exploration difficult.
Like yesterday, it was easy to avoid both people and cameras up to the door of interest. I could feel a slight resistance when I tried to look into the military building, but it was more akin to the force it takes to press a key on a keyboard than actual effort. If the frequency worked, I would be let into one of my top three types of rooms- a storage room. I didn’t want to spend too much time scoping everything out while I was standing in the open, so I stopped when I confirmed there were no security devices within. Additionally, since the reader was actually on the door, I was confident that it wouldn’t be connected to a central monitoring system- but that might also be inexperience speaking.
Like with other ports, pressing one of the flat parts of the tip of my tail against the slot was enough for it to do what was needed. A few seconds later, the LED flashed green and the lock retracted, letting me slip in. The room was probably dark.
Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I ever turned on the lights in my room- or turned them off if they started on. Note to self: ask someone about that when I’m done.
Like always, I took a look around to see if there was anything interesting in here that I could grab. With a literal pocket dimension, my previous ‘tool’-storage-pouch was now empty and ready to be filled with trinkets. However, to my disappointment, the only things in here were office supplies. I briefly considered taking a stapler, but ended up passing on it.
The building was bigger than I could make out- even with the lantern lit- but maps on the walls showed it to be U-shaped. It had two above ground floors and a basement, labs on the ends of the U with offices in the middle. In the empty space between the wings, there was a large testing ground with all sorts of setups for anything from guns to tractors. As expected, very few people were out and about, with about half being guards doing lazy rounds. It made sense; who would attack a facility so close to where a lot of MGs lived? As none of them were hurrying towards where I was, my guess that nothing was watching the door must have been correct.
I was about to start creeping around before I realized, ironically, I was less obvious just walking around normally. That realization kinda took the wind out of my sails, but my quick inspection of some of the labs more than made up for it. On that note, I had noticed some of the labs were shielded with the same sort of thing that the hidden room next to where I was interviewed was- but that couldn’t stop my prying eyes. Or was it horns now?
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
With a sigh, I opened the storage room and started walking towards the closer end of the building where the labs were located. I did my best to walk in a way that would minimize my time in the view of any cameras, but I was really betting on [Act Like You Belong] to continue covering for me. Aside from that, there were no complications, no people, and no noise besides my own steps. To my surprise, when I pulled on one of the doors to a lab at random, it swung open. This one wasn’t shielded from normal ULE and now that I was taking a more careful look at it looked unused for a while. A few tools were neatly laid out on the tables ringing the walls and with a few contraptions covered with a fine layer of dust near them.
Before touching anything, I plugged my tail into one of the computers in the room, noting that it didn’t require a password or login. Open on the monitor cloned into my vision was what looked like a record of experiments or research on alternate projectile propulsion systems. Par for the course of a military site, I guess. As far as I could tell, there was no one else in this wing of the building besides a guard making rounds on the floor above me- but they weren’t looking into the labs. Since the topic looked interesting from the handful of lines I read in the abstract, I skimmed through the rest of the document.
It started normal with a baseline from normal firearms, moved onto derivatives like packing ULE into the gunpowder for more power or into the bullet itself to cause it to explode, then some pre existing alternatives like coilguns and centrifugal rifles. I had at least heard of those, so I skipped a couple pages describing them so I could get down to the juicy and weird stuff.
I have to say, reading a serious report about theoretically shooting into an interdimensional space from which you could simply release projectiles was quite funny. Some of my other favorite suggestions for avenues of pursuit included teleporting a small objection directly into the target, teleporting chunks of a target out of their body, and altering the direction of gravity to ‘drop’ a projectile at someone. As far as this report was concerned, none of those actually existed… yet.
The final section before the conclusion was on something that the author had actually built. Ignoring the jargon and overly technical descriptions, the gist of what they had made was a way to instantly change the direction of an object's velocity without changing the acceleration vector (if there was one) or orientation. The catch was that by ‘an object’ it meant one specific object which was the machine that created the effect itself. Well, there are more catches, but it was deemed interesting and useless- so the project was dropped in favor of pursuing one of the other ideas presented in the report. The last bit on the object in the report was that it was moved to whatever ‘ULE Isolation Storage’ was.
The other program open on the computer was someone’s email. In fact, there was a message already selected that looked like it was sent from this computer. It contained a copy of the report, a quick explanation of it, and a notice that the author was going to use all their remaining break time for the year starting the day it was sent. From that, my best guess was that they got upset when their velocity-changing system was rejected, but finished the report- then left without properly cleaning up and locking everything down. For the heck of it, I installed a RAT to dig around a bit more before I disconnected.
Definitely in recognition of their hard work- and not because I was itching to nab something- I vowed to liberate and make use of their machine… somehow. I did have a clue it was in ULE Isolation Storage, but that could be anywhere. And from the sound of the name it was probably some secret blacksite that would be completely inaccessible until I become an action-hero-thief or something. For now, I made do with some of the tools and materials laying around.
My storage was limited, so I only took a soldering iron, small blowtorch, and capacitor the size of my (admittedly small) stacked fists. Like with most of the stuff I had stolen, I had no clue what I was going to do with them, but it felt so wrong to just leave them there.
With the small haul leaving me wanting, I headed up a level to avoid the guard starting to patrol on the ground floor where I was, then over in the direction of the other wing I hadn’t been able to perceive yet.