…and finally, tonight, neighbors are still concerned about the whereabouts of the McStay family, who they say went missing two days ago and are so far the 3rd family to go missing in the Bay in as many as five weeks. A spokesperson for the SCPD has stated that the police are looking into it but stresses that none of the cases are connected in any way. Predictably the neighborhood has pushed back against it.
-Millerton Bay Live Nightly News
Millerton Bay was founded in 2930, 30 years after the founding of Madrono City, and is the 3rd settlement on Izanami. It was nestled between the two largest mountains in the southernmost region of Izanami, Goji and Cero, and about 10 hours away from Saint Century via atmospheric air travel. Millerton Bay was a medium-sized—population of approximately 800k—blue-collar city and shipping port that fed into Izanami’s other major ocean, the Hadgami Sea. The city paled compared to Saint Century and her whopping 5 billion strong population density, but they made due.
Strict emigrating by-laws enshrined into the settlement charter kept population levels low at the Bay, which allowed it to run reasonably efficiently. Suffice it to say; the Bay suffers from a lot of what some call churn and burn. It is not uncommon for the average person's life on Izanami to go: Born in Saint Century -> Work in Millerton -> Die in Saint Century. But one had a sliver of a chance at making a decent wage for yourself if one worked hard. Sometimes the best of the best got work and stayed in the city until they dropped dead, a true honor.
The crown jewel of the bay was its harbor district, an eclectic neighborhood by the name of Wayne. Multiple warehouses, apartment complexes, and a bustling leisure area made for exciting neighbors like the world-famous bleedcaster, Spydalow. An OH with the ability to manipulate the gravitons of anything relative to his touch, Spyda earned fame via live-streaming acts of vigilantism and incredible parkour feats.
Despite being Millertons only famous public-facing OH and hero, Spydalow lived a simple life in his tiny cubed apartment, nestled in a decaying apartment complex alongside his good buddy and portable production studio, Spydacam. A floating sphere with a telescoping eye and three 2-inch long legs on either side of it, the custom bot filmed Spyda anytime he felt like venturing out.
Like other heroes, Spydalow was all about branding. On his face sat a pair of round yellow lenses that reflected the room around him; a 5x5 cube at best with no bed and one tiny analog computer. Still, it suited a guy who stuck to walls just fine. On his chest was a fat yellow bug whose “legs” stretched around his shoulders. On his website, aside from videos, are links to his crowdfunding page, which essentially paid for his meager existence. People who subbed to him also had access to his social media. DM’s, and most of his tips for any action going down, came in from there.
Some ambushes, too.
Jumanga: spydaaaaaaa
Bigc45: fml
SpYdAlOw: @jumanga yooooooo
MMMmmMM: Spayda sux @here
Kilo2356: lol
Bigc45: got a cold in the middle of summer rip :cry: :cry:
TheKid: F
SpYdAlOw: F
Tonight his DM’s sat empty, so it was an off night. He sat in his channel chat room and shitposted with the rest of his fans. Spydacam floated over by his head, carrying something in its tiny legs. It was two pieces of chocolate as if the little bot had read his mind.
NIKKI: Been feeling like crap myself, but m p sure its just allergies.
Jumanga: No stream? L
“Thanks, bud,” Spyda said, letting the two pieces drop into his outstretched hand. He studied the wrapper, sad to realize it was only chocolate taffy. He glanced up at the little cam bot, and it made a tragic beep.
“Aw, nobody’s perfect, bud,” He told it in a low voice, and it beeped happily. Spyda shrugged and tore into both pieces, dropping them into his mouth like medicine tablets. He chewed on it like a cow chewed the cud and went back to typing. His notifications started going off in the bottom corner of his custom OS. The computer may look old, but it was a style thing, as inside the casing were decent specs. That being said, he wished he had installed a touch screen.
He gently pressed against the little nub, jutting up just so from the keyboard, and moved the cursor on his screen toward the DM. He hovered over it and scanned the message preview:
Spyda,
Check out the Warehouse complex.
Building 5.
Spyda continued to chew on the taffy in his mouth, feeling like it got tougher with every move of his jaw. He hated DMs like this. New profile, nothing identifiable; should go straight to the bin. But, then again, he did need content. He glanced over at Spydacam and mumbled something that should have sounded like this:
“What do you think, Bud?” The little robot did a spin of approval in the air. Spyda smirked, still chewing, and began typing to the room:
SpYdAlOw: Going live in 15.
Bigc45: YAAAAA
TheKid: AAAAA
[https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/939246405011251231/1061111741578223616/spydalowandspydacam.png?width=670&height=670]
----------------------------------------
Bundled together, warehouses in Millerton were east of the central piers. The complex was a 1500 hundred-acre diamond-shaped lot with over a hundred buildings that shot upward up to 50 stories with multiple storage areas per floor. Hundreds of on and off-world companies use the Millerton Bay storage area even if they don’t do business there. Some shared space with others, while the richest of them would typically have their own unique space. A nice racket some have is to lease the space themselves but sublet it, at a hefty markup, to other smaller companies.
With such a massive complex, finding building five was surprisingly easy for Spydalow. After a bit of deep net digging, he found a layout plan, and if he was reading it right, he was close to it as he could be without being inside. Perched on a light tower that looked over the entire complex from about a mile away, he tapped the side of his head and activated the zoom-in features of his lenses. The building’s lease belonged to Damarco Intergalactic, a firm he had never heard of. A cursory web search revealed even less beyond a simple website. The site claimed the company specialized in imports and exports and didn’t elaborate beyond that. Spyda licked his lips; he could smell something juicy.
The complex was dead as far as people went, but hundreds of security drones patrolled the entire complex at random intervals. Most were on the ground and easy enough to avoid; it was the flying ones that he was worried about. They were about the size of a small cat, shaped like a bean, and had four ball-shaped mini anti-grav pulse engines that allowed them to maneuver deftly in the air.
Spydacam flew into his peripheral vision, and he decided to end the recon. He gave one last look at the complex and spitball an approximate distance away before doing some quick and dirty math in his head. No problem, he thought, he had this. He climbed to the tower's very top, jutted his arms out to his side, pumped his legs hard, and jumped. He very nearly undershot it but landed right on the side of one of the buildings, further from the roof than he’d liked. Spyda perched on building one at the lowest tip of the diamond. Building 5 was located somewhere near the middle.
He started walking up the building toward the roof. His footfalls were heavy; invisible strings brought his feet down as fast as he could lift them and his muscles felt tense and alive. He reached the top quickly, walked over to the other side of the roof, and checked out the rest of the complex. Spydacam trailed him fitfully and obediently. He turned to the little robot.
“Okay, bud,” He said. “Let’s go live.” The robot beeped, and a red light immediately glowed behind the small telescoping lens. With a slight mechanical noise, it zoomed in on Spydalows face.
MacFRY: spydaaaaaaaa
Bigc45: 17 min, smh
“Okay, guys, Spydalow here! So what's up, friends and fam? Don’t forget to smash that like button and make sure to subscribe to my CrowdFundr!” The spiel was muscle memory at this point, dripping off his lips like melted butter. The chat room scrolled at a mile a minute in his peripheral vision. He slapped his hands together excitedly and said:
“Now, tonight, we got a mystery on our hands! We’re live right now at the storage complexes downtown,” and Spydacam slowly panned over to show off the view from their location. “And, of course, your boy is on a roof and ready to rock. One of you sent me a very interesting DM and told me to check out ‘building 5,’ so I figured, why not? The Spydafam needs content, so imma bring the content to the Spydafam!”
Jumanga: oof
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
RoxxII: spydaaaaaa
K1K1K1 donated 100 CC!
Spydacam panned back over to him, and he motioned for it to follow him. He pointed off to the distance, and the robot followed and tried to focus on a cluster of buildings located 60 to 80 feet away.
“See down there?” He said to the camera. “Building 5 is located in there somewhere, the tallest one if I’m remembering things right.” He grabbed Spydacam between his fingers and twisted it on its axis, so it faced him again. “Now ya know I’m not one to go off half-cocked, so I did my research into who owned the storage, and all I got is more questions! Look up ‘Damarco Intergalactic’ guys and tell me what you find.”
Bigc45: find DEEZ
NIKKI: not feeling well, heading to bed see if I can kick this thing. Noght @everyone
NIKKI: *night.
Bigc45: Night
Jumanga: Night.
SamSeder: Spydaaaaaa
Spyda paused as he heard a very low buzzing. It was one of the security bots about to pass over this roof. Thinking quickly, he cartwheeled over the side of the building and adhered to its side, crouched low. He was almost perfectly parallel with the ground below and could see the land-based bots going through their patrols while clouds in the sky moved behind him at a glacial pace. Using his core muscles, he shifted his posture from crouching forward to laying back first on the wall and looked up. The buzzing was getting faint; the flying robot would move on soon.
SC floated in front of his face, and he smirked.
“Okay, guys, this will probably require a little stealth, so just bear with me. If spydacam loses me, don’t fret, he’s always geo-locked to me and will make his way back to me eventually. Because he’s a good bot, aren’t you, bud?” The robot squeaked again.
Spyda stood up straight on the wall and perpendicular to it. He looked down and watched the last sentries move on and leave the area. He smirked, crouched low, and jumped again. Being able to reverse the pull of gravitons to push allowed him to jump pretty far, as long as he did the math in his head regarding how much force he could use.
He touched the outer wall of one of the buildings seconds later; the soles of his yellow boots made soft pops as they made contact. He jogged up the wall, taking long strides to move faster. The outer shell of the building was gunmetal gray with red markings on every sharp corner and around the windows. All the windows were blacked out, and a large number 3 was stenciled onto the outer wall near the roof. Spyda made a note of it before he twist-flipped upside down and outside-in onto the roof in a beautiful ark.
He landed half crouched, arms outstretched, and followed his momentum into a forward combat roll. He pushed off with both arms into another high ark flip, landing feet first like an Olympic gymnast. It was so extra, but that’s what they paid for. He thought about the building number and clicked through his mental OS until he found a map he had downloaded earlier. If this was building 3…
Newuser200678: Spyda is a tool of the elite kys
Newuser200678: spyda kys
Newuser200678 has left the chat!
The building was part of a cluster of buildings that was a diamond inside of a diamond. On Spyda’s map, 3 was the tip, and directly across a vast chasm was 4. Buildings 1 and 2 were also across the chasm from each other. Spyda turned to study the buildings lined up at the outer diamond; 6, 7, 8, and 9 accounted for that. He took a second to mark each one. Nothing but a significant drop separated the four buildings of his diamond so that just had him wondering:
“Where’s 5?” The chatroom responded with emojis and joke answers that he ignored. The map said building 5 was right at the center, but only the mighty chasm lay before him. Spyda scrunched his nose, suddenly very annoyed. He closed his eyes behind his lenses, breathed in deep, held that in for 4 seconds, and exhaled.
Easy, think logically.
“Maybe the map is old?” He said as he swiped the chat away. He was talking to himself more than anything, and they were distracting. Spydacam sputtered behind him and hovered around his shoulder. It beeped three times in a row, and he glanced at it.
DuMbIsMyAsThEtIc: spyda such a dumbass, LMAO
Bigc45: chat’s wiling today.
“What’s up, bud?” The robot made a show of switching through different lenses on its face several times before he got it. It wanted him to look at what it was filming. While it could be said that it was a bit gouache to watch one’s own stream, Spyda figured this was as good a reason as any. He tapped his head again and switched his display to a live feed from spydacam; seconds later, the little robot switched to infrared.
There it was, building 5.
Spyda stepped back to get a good look at it as it was five stories taller than all the ones around it. He couldn’t help but feel that this was a lot of trouble for a building owned by a small import/export business. He moved away from the feed and switched back to chat, who all but insinuated he was some sort of scared cat. He ignored that. No way he wasn’t going in there, but there was nothing wrong with some caution.
DevourHour: spydaaaaaa
xxxJANExxx: My cam is going live now, come see? :*
xxxJANExxx has left the chat!
He switched his lenses over to infrared and studied the outside of the building. Nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the cloaking. Opting to stay ahead of any patrols and get a better look at the facility, he started hopping from roof to roof. There were no windows or visible marking on the outside, not even the hints of any that the cloaking could hide. No obvious alarm system jumped out at him either.
Now standing on top of building 2, Spyda decided he needed a better look at the top of this cloaked tower. It’d take one hell of a jump if he were to clear the top, but he was almost certain he had jumped bigger. The chat told him to hurry up. He sent a command to spydacam and had it position itself above the higher roof and track him; it obeyed immediately and zipped up. He backed up to the far edge of the roof and once again did some calculations in his head. Not enough force and he luckily hits the side of the wall, maybe sets off an alarm, maybe gets arrested.
Too much force, and maybe he lands in the bay, and he’s probably the single worst swimmer he knows.
Satisfied, he took a deep breath and let out a nice long exhale before he sprinted hard. Heavy boots hit the ground and filled the air; seconds later, he jumped. 5’s walls rushed away from him as he angled his body and tucked his arms in to make himself more aerodynamic. He tucked his whole body in next and tumbled upside down. Just as he reached the jump's apex, he used this moment to study the roof below him:
A single entrance. No guards and no cameras. But there was an AI box, precisely what he had hoped to see. Most of the warehouses here were “dumb”; the security drones did most of the thinking, planning, and protecting. The most you could do in these warehouses was ask for the lights to go off and on or regulate the temperature. He’d have to hack that first if he wanted, which might also give him an insight into the security inside.
Spyda cleared the other side of 5’s roof with barely enough clearance to kiss the lip if he wanted. His boots landed on building 3 loudly, and he allowed momentum to carry him into a forward roll. Spydacam beeped a little song as it approached him above. He checked the chat room and saw at least one “10/10 would watch again”, followed by a bunch of donations.
Bigc45:This is why I sub
Jumanga: :praise: :praise: :praise:
LadySteel213458: spydaaaaaa
“Okay, guys,” he whispered. “Gotta hack the AI box to the building, and then I’m in. That’s the good news; the bad news is I need spydacam to help, so I gotta go offline for a mo.” The avalanche of disappointment memes flooded the room and sent it scrolling a million miles an hour. “I’ll be back; just hang tight.” And he sent a command to cut the feed.
Spyda backflipped from the roof, landed on 5’s outer wall, and stood. He had internally winced, having half expected that touching the building would have set the alarm off, and he unclenched when it didn’t. Truthfully that was 80% of why he cut the stream more than anything, as a live fail would have seriously hurt his rep. Ahead was the ground, and behind him was the sky; he turned and ran toward the sky.
He hit the lip of the roof and looked around. A single-entrance stairwell lay just a few feet ahead and was secured by a thick metal door. Beside that was what looked like an iris scanner. To the right of this were a series of vents leading from the wall to a 3-foot tall machine, the climate control module. A blue meter glowed defiantly, indicating it was alive and kicking. Spyda followed its length with his gaze before landing on what he was looking for: The AI box.
Most “dumb” apartments, houses, and the like had low-level AIs running the place and interacting with residents. Spyda’s garbage hole of an apartment had such an AI, but he had disabled it on moving day because one robot was enough in his life as far as that went. Regardless, such buildings had AI boxes on their roofs. Essentially a brain for the building in question, each housed the processor containing the logic board and quantum CPU, encased in a titanium shell that could only be accessed by authorized personnel.
The box was egg-shaped and was suspended 10 inches off the ground via a pole. Spyda kneeled in front of it and whistled, beckoning spydacam. The little bot hovered by his ear, and a small compartment on its underside slid open before producing an optic cable that slithered into his outstretched hand. He felt around the casing with his free hand, looking for the technician's external port to plug into. A moment of fruitless pawing eventually hit paydirt on the underside.
He pulled the retractable cable wire and plugged it into the port. He switched to spydacam’s meager OS and watched the code from the box flood his vision. The AI itself wouldn’t handle this; it likely had a sub-mind dedicated to security as an outer layer, and there it was right on cue. No point getting its proverbial hands dirty, Spyda figured. It was a call and response system, the sub mind fishing for authorization, and you needed to answer or consider yourself done. Spydacam had a very top-of-the-line logic board, Spyda made sure of that, and it had already found the right set of code words to be given access to the greater system.
Spyda knew he couldn’t loiter here for long. Eventually, the AI could suss them out and give them the boot. So he immediately unlocked the stair door and then perused the rest of the security routine. Surprisingly there was nothing, no guard patrols, no sentry drones. For curiosities sake, he checked out the temperature inside; it was 2 degrees Celcius and freezing.
“This is getting weird, huh, bud?” He asked. An elongated squeak responded. Satisfied, he disconnected the cable and watched it snap back into SC with enough force to cause the oblong bot to float slightly higher.
“Okay, go live,” he said, and the camera floated over to his face with a red light prominent. “Okay, we’re back, fam! As you can see, I got the door open, and I’m going in.” SC briefly flipped to show off the open door but then focused back on spyda as he made his way through. The little bot followed dutifully, floating just above his back.
*OFFLINE*
*OFFLINE*
*OFFLINE*
“Hey,” Spyda said after they had both gotten further inside. “Signals dead, the hell?”
On his display screen, the chat was offline, as was his channel. Confused, he walked back outside and saw everything had reconnected. Back inside, there it went again.
“Gresh damn it,” he said and stepped back out. He pulled up the chat and saw them predictably losing their minds. He sent out the following:
SpYdAlOw: Looks like this is a dead zone guys, will take footage and brb
Jumanga: F
Bigc45: F
Omegaman: F
He stepped inside, instructed SC to only record for now, and slowly descended the stairs. At the bottom was another door, a regular everyday door but one nonetheless. He approached it cautiously and gently tapped the handle with a fingertip. Satisfied it was safe, he opened it.
A cold chill hit him instantly, and his breath became apparent right in front of his face. SC made something like a sad squeak as it knew how well it’d do in a cold environment such as this one; not well at all. Spyda was on one side of a room-wide balcony. The entire building was hollow, with no floors and just a vast chasm before him. A flimsy metal balcony was the only thing serving to keep him from falling in. Cautiously, he peered over the edge.
His face went white.
Bodies. Just a massive pile of bodies sat at the bottom.
SC rose higher and angled down to capture this sight while Spyda slowly hyperventilated. Suddenly the room drained of all its color and flashed red on and off; time to go. Spyda whistled and booked it up the stairs two at a time. A grate was sliding down over the door at the top; this would be tight.
Spydalow jumped to the wall, kicked off it, then ping-ponged off the other wall and dove. He cleared underneath it by a millimeter but didn’t cease his momentum, rolling forward and jumping as hard as he could off the roof and onto building 3.
A swarm cloud of security drones descended.
Spyda rolled away. A small metal bead ejected from his palm and expanded upon contact with the air into a baseball-sized sphere. Secure in his palm, he tossed it at the swarm, and it exploded. Adhesive glue expanded rapidly and grounded the entire formation. Spyda pivoted, backflipped away, kicked off the roof, and bounded clear of the complex. Landing on the light tower from earlier, Spyda glanced back to see if more pursuit was coming.
Nothing.
Satisfied, he started the trek back home.
He had a long upload ahead of him.