Joe was startled by a knock on the adjoining door. When he opened his side, there stood Jean in an outfit that matched his own, only she looked a lot sexier in it. Black stretchy slacks and turtleneck that were like a comfortable second skin were just the background for the matching utility vest littered with pockets and thieves tools. When a person bought the thieves’ tools in DnD, Joe imagined they ended up with all this stuff. Their shoes were the kind of dancer’s sneakers that made it almost impossible to make noise when walking. Top all that off with a utility belt and black cap that helped hide his light-colored hair and he felt like he was in an Entrapment remake fantasy.
“What?” Jean asked, a teasing grin on her face. “You thought you’d do this without me?”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” he grinned at her.
“Tam is off in the kitchen, but she said to give you the afternoon off,” and the wink that accompanied that was probably also from Tam.
“Awesome,” Joe kept grinning, an uncharacteristic thing for him. Even his jaw muscles knew he didn’t ever do that.
“I’d guess that the schematics are kept in a safe in the manager’s office behind the front desk,” Jean said as Joe reached for the room door and paused. He hadn’t even known where he was going to look.
“Why do you think that?” he asked.
“Check your pockets,” Jean pointed to one of the dozens of pockets on his outfit. “I went through them all while you were messing around in the bathroom. I wanted to see what tools we’d get and found the note.”
Joe felt stupid. He should have gone through his pockets and gotten familiar with his tools. He had lockpicks in a small, leather, roll-up pouch. He had a headset hooked up to a stethoscope-type thing. There were clamps, a retractable rope, halters, carabiners with a matte finish so they didn’t clank when banged together, a glasscutter, some suction cups, penlight, an employee key card, and a few tubes of some gel that became acid when combined. There was also a pocketknife, the kind that came with all the little pull-out tools you could imagine, in a belt-pouch that also had what looked like a mini-fishing/survival kit. He could have spent two hours just pouring over the tools, but he just gave them quick glances and then put them all back.
Joe also found the note which said:
You’ll find the safe in the manager’s office behind check-in. There will be a folder marked “Blackestmail” in the safe. Bring that to room 471 by midnight tonight and slip it under the door. You can keep whatever else is in the safe. This is the price of my “help.” Betray me and I’ll make sure you never leave the hotel alive.
“Everybody’s looking for something,” Jean shrugged as Joe read it to himself.
“Sounds good to me,” Joe crumpled the paper and stuffed it back in a pocket.
“I noticed an employee elevator at the end of the hall,” Jean suggested as they slid into the empty hallway.
“That must be what this is for,” Joe found the key card and brandished it.
“Housekeeping should be done for the day,” Jean commented, hot on his heels as they hurried down the hall decked out in tables full of what smelled like fresh tropical flowers. “The only staff coming and going from the elevator at this time of day should be room service, and Tam said she’d give us a heads-up if anyone ordered food from our floor or lower.”
“Wait,” Joe paused at the elevator door. “Why don’t we just pose as room service and bring the manager lunch?”
“Because then we’d miss out on being cat burglars,” Jean took the employee card from Joe's hand and used it on the elevator controls as he nodded in enthusiastic agreement.
“My dream job, I gotta say,” Joe admitted to Jean.
“Sweet,” Jean nodded back at him, and they grinned like idiots at each other until the elevator opened.
Exp +100 (Quest: More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
The elevator took them to the basement employee parking garage, complete with maintenance offices, storage rooms, and more importantly, air conditioning vents. It was absurd from a RW perspective since air conditioners had long ago been replaced by the climate control app on smartwatches, but Joe didn’t care why the vents were there. They picked the lock on a storage room and found the perfect vent with a stairway of boxes that led up to it.
Once Joe maneuvered his little pack onto his stomach instead of his back, he had just enough room to crawl up and into the largest of the vents. Not that Kodo or Podo were still in the pack, and Hex wasn’t in his vest collar. They’d scampered right out and into the vents before him, their little paws making almost no noise on the metal, making Joe think that Hex’s float spell was coming in handy for all his little furballs. It was tricky at first to find a rhythm of crawling through the vents that didn’t thunder with the warping of the thin metal, but as his skill in Acrobatic Stealth went up, the sound they made went down.
There was a slippery uphill part that nearly did them in, but they made it by helping each other. Jean pushed Joe up the ramp, and he pulled her up once he got to the top. That little maneuver bumped their skills up by five points. Joe was a little out of breath as they neared the vent that opened into the manager’s office. Unfortunately, the manager was sitting at his desk. The room was relatively small with a nice oak desk, ergonomic chair, file cabinets, and no visible safe. There were motivational posters and one piece of art in an elaborate frame, and Joe figured the safe was behind that. The art was a modern reinterpretation of a historical favorite of dogs playing poker on velvet, only this one was done by clown artist Ollie Popov, a descendant of one of the most famous clowns in history, who was currently popular for his work portraying old artwork with clowns instead of the original famous figures. This one had six clowns that mimicked the postures and poses of the original dogs. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t to Joe's taste either. The fact that the safe was probably behind that painting was cliché, but he loved it.
Jean must have thought similar thoughts because her face was split in a grin just as wide and corny as Joe's. She pulled out her phone and started texting. Joe hadn’t really gotten around to carrying the cell phones he’d stolen. Joe was certainly glad that Jean was with him. He’d have probably figured it out, but she definitely made it so much easier. When Jean was done typing into her phone, she turned the readout to Joe.
Jean: Need distraction for manager at front desk.
Tam: K. 10 mins.
Jean: Stuck in a vent.
Tam: Send the furballs.
Jean: Furballs in vent 2.
Tam: 5 mins.
Jean: 2?
Tam: Incoming.
It was a long two minutes, but Tam came through spectacularly. He and Jean heard muffled raised voices. The manager got up and opened his door, and they got the full brunt of a Tam celebrity fit.
“I’ve got four different chefs all calling for four different types of truffles!” Tam was ranting. “Does this look like a Piedmont white?”
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Joe quickly used his little pocketknife screwdriver to open the vent cover while Jean held it to keep it from falling in a loud bang.
“This is not a Piedmont white truffle!” Tam was screaming. “This is a Muscat truffle! Do you know what happens when you put a Muscat in a sauce for a signature Batali white sauce?”
Kodo and Podo, with Hex on their tails, slipped out of the vent as soon as there was the tiniest gap. Whiskers were twitching all over that office. They had their own little interests as they poked noses into cubbies and drawers, pilfering anything sparkly or tasty, though Hex turned her nose up at the manager’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunch. Kodo took one bite, but then spat it out in the trash can. It would seem that his pets were developing snooty palates.
“You get a brown sauce,” Tam was still ranting. “Did Batali want a brown sauce? NO! And when Batali says that he’s serving a white truffle sauce, he doesn’t mean a muddy brown Muscat sauce.”
They lowered the vent to the floor silently, and Joe was proud of them. He did wonder how long a rant about truffles could go on, but if he thought that Tam had come unprepared for a long argument, he was very wrong. Luckily, it was the only thing he was wrong about at that moment. He and Jean both headed straight for the painting. The one piece of artwork did indeed hide the safe. The picture frame swung open on quiet hinges to reveal an old-fashioned tumbler safe that almost made him giggle like a little girl with chocolate birthday cake hidden under her pillow.
“Unless you’d like me to take this thousand-dollar Scorzone and peel off a few hundred dollars of the darker part just to make sure the sauce is white,” Tam growled out loudly enough to be heard in the suites. “But then we’d be fraudulently convincing thousands of guests that this bitter Scorzone is actually the smooth musky flavor of a true white. If you’re wanting the new princess and all her celebrity guests to be snickering behind their hands at how immature the AIs for the best chefs of the 2000s…”
Joe lost a bit of the rest as he and Jean plugged their earpieces in and listened for the tumblers. It was everything Joe had imagined it to be. In his sweetest dreams of midnight thievery, he’d never imagined that it would be so easy. Of course, Joe didn’t believe that the little pop-up minigame was anything like a real safe-cracking job, but it was fun anyway. It was this old-timey safe with a dial that went first one way and then the other three times. For each direction, they had to identify a sound and match it to its source. Four farts, three kisses, and twenty-one cheers later, and they had an open safe.
“I’m not telling Masuhara Morimoto that he’s got to give up his Black Summer nutty goodness just because you don’t know a Perigord from an Alba!” Tam was louder than before, and they were grateful because it covered the clunk of the safe opening. It was loud enough for Kodo and Podo to perk up at the sound, but not so loud that anyone was going to hear it over Tami’s brilliant diatribe.
“I’m saying you need to find me an Alba truffle in the next hour, is what I’m saying,” Tam went on, and Joe was pretty sure she could have said anything and gotten away with it. These AIs probably knew very little about truffles, whereas his AIs had advanced processing. “A. L. B. A. Alba,” she was spelling it out, and Joe could just imagine their sweating faces as they scribbled it down.
Inside the safe was one envelope labeled “Blackmail” and another labeled “Schematics,” but that wasn’t all that was interesting. It was a really big safe. There were two large stacks of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, which disappeared, split equally, into each of their knapsacks. There were two other envelopes marked “Blackermail” and “Blackestmail.” Joe slipped those down his back with the other two envelopes, like he had the paperback books in the bookstore.
“Honestly, who doesn’t know an Alba from a Muscat?” Tam was continuing, sounding almost bored with herself. “Don’t forget the Perigord. Guichon is insisting on using it in some chocolate sauce for the lava cakes. I think it’s a waste since it will be totally drowned out by the chocolate, but he insists that it’s even better than expresso for flavor enhancement.”
The biggest find was Podo’s, and when she handed Joe the skeleton key card from the manager’s desk, he could have wept with joy. Instead, Joe gave her a very nice rub that she leaned into as he did it. They’d gotten lucky on a mechanical lock for the storage room, but the rest of the doors of the hotel were controlled by these cards. Joe traded his employee key card for the manager one and motioned for Podo to put the employee card back where she’d found the manager’s. Joe hoped it would make it take longer for the manager to notice that their master card was missing. Would it work on the jewelry store door? Podo nodded excitedly and did as Joe bid.
“Can you imagine? Truffle over coffee for chocolate enhancement? I think it’s too over-the-top when you consider the coffee flavors we could be using,” Tam lectured the manager, who was stuck listening since she was a guest, and he was programmed for customer service. “A deep Kopi Luwak espresso-infused crème for a ganache can do more than half a pound of shaved Perigord. What I wouldn’t give to be able to show that blowhard that mine is better than his. Come to think of it, since you’re getting the Alba, you can also get some Kopi Luwak, kaymak—that’s yak cream—and there’s this new Nigerian cocoa company. Get me two thousand bars of their darkest chocolate. I’ll give that chocolate clown something to think about.”
Joe and Jean rifled through some more desk drawers, careful to put stuff back where they found them, but nothing was as good as what they’d found in the safe, and it sounded like Tam was shifting from her job as a distraction and into a chef-orgasm moment. They lifted the critters up into the vent and closed it behind them.
“Just because he can make a life-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower in Chocolate for the reception doesn’t mean he knows how to make it taste amazing,” Tam was pontificating as Jean sent her a text to let her know they were safe. “Ah, good, get me those things in the next hour and we’ll be fine. I’m sorry to cause such a fuss. I’m not normally so temperamental but working around the ultimately talented has a way of bringing that out in me. If you get all that to the kitchen in half an hour, I’ll send fresh donuts to the front desk for everyone. I’m off to keep Batali from strangling Morimoto for his truffles. Ta!”
Joe and Jean shuffled their way out of the vents and managed to make it to the storage room before they broke out in a serious fit of the chortles and giggles. That was a sight to see with Jean, who was helped along by the ferrets tickling her as they slid all the way down the last ramp like kids on the playground.
Exp +400 (Get the Schematics to the Safe Room. Quest Complete!)
Quest: Gather your Team
Convince three specialists to join you to hit the jewelry store safe. You’ll need an electronics specialist (try room 922), a chemist (he hangs out at the bar between midnight and 2am), and two cat burglars (it seems like you have those).
Rewards: 200 xp The Next Step in the Quest.
Accept Y/N.
“I’ve got to see this blackmail that required three whole envelopes,” Jean prodded Joe as they sat on the boxes in the storage room.
“I’m a little curious too,” Joe admitted, tugging the envelopes out of the back of his shirt. Hex was playing with a dust bunny in one corner while the ferrets had disappeared back into the vents.
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Joe took the one with just “Blackmail” on it and unwound the string and flap. He was glad they weren’t sealed envelopes, or he’d have wondered for a moment if they’d get in trouble. Even as Joe had that thought, he shoved it down like the old him back in that box where it wanted to be anyway. As Joe slid out the incriminating photos, he gave a low whistle. This was going to blow their PG rating for sure if they showed this on the screen.
Jean gave out an echoing whistle as they traded stacks of photos, her having opened the Blackermail one as he’d opened the Blackmail. “All I can say is that everybody’s looking for something,” she said, turning one picture upside down with a frown. “And this is something.”
“Some of them want to abuse you and some of them want to be abused, right?” Joe shook his head, and they placed their photos back into the envelopes they came out of, being careful to put them in the correct envelopes. “This one’s something else!”
“It’s all fun and games,” Jean raised her eyebrows in what almost looked like admiration for the art of the photographs. She was looking at each photo as she slid them away, her eyes almost playful. “There’s no blood so no foul, right?”
“Just your average blackmail material, right?” Joe tried to joke with her, relaxing since she didn’t seem overly put out about the content of the envelopes.
Then Joe broke open the last envelope and Jean’s prediction of no blood was blown out of the water. They were crime scene photos only it was like no one had reported the crime yet. Ten photos showed ten different men all trussed up for scenes like the previous blackmail photos, only they were also very dead. There was one last photo. It was of Glenda, decked out like the dominatrix of death, her grin almost feral as she held up the head of one of her victims, an almost bald man with a slack jaw who was obviously dead, but quite possibly from sexual satisfaction.
“Um, Jean,” Joe stuttered out, passing the photos to her and watching her frown carefully. “Did Glenda mean it when she said she’d send a battalion of whatever out to get us if we didn’t show up on time?”
Jean’s face showed no surprise as she got to the last photo of Glenda and a few more pieces clicked together in Joe’s mind. “She was probably exaggerating,” Jean answered Joe and kept the photos, holding out her hand for the envelope that was still in his. “I’ll deliver these to the correct room for the quest.”
Joe quickly checked their itinerary and gave a little sigh of relief. They had a half an hour to get to Glenda’s rehearsal. “Should I be worried?”
“Not unless you’re worried about Tam and me too,” Jean shrugged like they were talking about truffles. “She’s a black widow, but she’s also very selective. I wouldn’t think any of them didn’t deserve it.”
“That’s good,” Joe nodded, as if that made it all okay. Did it? “So, the Prince of Persia or wherever he’s from is a mark?”
“Actually,” Jean gave an odd tilt of her head as if this part was what baffled her the most, “it seems like this time she’s fallen in love.”