Basement [REESE]

[TETRIS]

Beneath the cozy rooms, the grungy living space, and homey kitchen, is a dark, secret lair.
B1: Several large engines churn in the background, and a furnace gasps and wheezes like a tired old beast.
B2: In the small abandoned nest of piping, tubing, concrete and steel underneath, is a windowless area that once housed gas tanks. Now, the apartments are renovated. They no longer burn gasoline, but run on electricity (some of which is siphoned off of nearby buildings, thanks to mecha). The abandoned, cramped level has become a small workspace that Mecha has built for himself. He has a room assigned to his name, but it's far more common to find him here, banging away at something or napping on his cot.

The elevator waited patiently for its fare, moving down as soon as the pressure lock was undone with the weight of the individual. Mecha had thrown out the safety precautions so the lift appealed better to his patience. Only a little, though.

Doors slid open at B1. A shelf on two wheels was knocked over on its side. The cylinders it had been carrying were punctured, with a clear liquid (probably some fuel) puddling underneath the open mouth. Another tangle of wires, clamps, poles nearby was the only remnant of something that might have once been an engine. Most of the strange objects were works in progress, abandoned by the fickle whimsy of the mechanic who had wounded the contraptions in fey fits of rage, kicking them pathetically across the floor.

In the next room though, after Mecha had unlocked the metal door and shunted it open, the working space was surprisingly large, as though it took up the same space as the whole first floor, there were tables littered across the back, with endless rows of spare parts all categorized, some connected to other devices, some not.

Several vehicles were propped against a wall. Old motorcycles, bicycles, and several scooters with engines. Most were skeletons, their hulls tossed in a pile of colourful plexiglass in the corner. On the opposite wall, a long row of computers and complex drives took up the left side, only 2 of the 7 screens appeared to be off, the rest all had data running across them. Nothing especially interesting; some showing internet connections, others explaining their own contents.

Nestled in one corner was the second lift. It was such an antiquated elevator it had no door; just a wire mesh cage which tremblingly lowered to the second sub-basement. B2. Since the building was renovated, the shiny new elevator installed, B2 had been abandoned. Mecha had taken up residence here, however.

Stepping off into the low-ceilinged area, the room was as large as the first, dimly lit. Two tables occupied the centre of the room. An old, creased map of the sewer system, which crossed this part of the sector, was splayed on one table. From the looks of the scribbled sketches and markings covering the paper, Mecha had used this system to his advantage, all to reduce the costs of running this apartment complex. The money he saved was his rent, more or less.

The other table held various items. Several glue guns, a couple of old hammers and saws with modifications and reinforcements, and a heap of scrap metal. On closer inspection, most of it was armour, robotic machines, things that could be used to enhance his own mechanical arm. For such an old room, it was surprisingly brightly lit. Wires ran across the ceiling, connecting to an odd dozen or so overhead lights suspended from the steel beams. Mecha picked up a blowtorch, and set it down after a few minutes.

Irritable, he got back into the cage and ascended to the first basement floor, where he perched over one of the monitors, typing away with impressive ease, considering his mechanized arm.

[Angie]

Blasted mutt!

For the fourth time in two days, Chief had managed to over-power Reese. Once he had pushed past her in an open doorway while she struggled carrying three grocery bags, twice he had taken off after something that tickled his fancy (a hot dog cart, a dropped ice cream cone, a ball on the loose) when his mistress took him out to the loo, and as of recent he snapped his leash. Said leash was supposed to be able to hold a fifty pound dog.

One tug from an excited Great Dane puppy, at the blue and white leash had snapped. In a flash, Chief was gone. A curious thing, he loved to explore; there was no telling where he had padded off to. The smallest of thing attracted the puppy’s attention. There was no way Reese would be able to predict where her pooch would turn up. Of course, logically she checked all of his favorite spots first: the communal kitchens on floors two through five, the stairwells, and the dumpster behind the building. When Chief hadn’t turned up yet, Reese continued her search.

Usually, he wasn’t hard to find. His size made him both awkward and noticeable. The poor pup had more leg than he knew what to do with. Constantly tripping over himself, he tended to leave little clues as to where he had been: broken vases and picture frames and over-turned trash bins. On the contrary, today Chief had successfully stumped Reese as to his whereabouts. After searching the halls of every floor as well as any other opened areas, she hadn’t spotted her pup—or any evidence that he had been by. There were a pair of wet shoes by one door, but there were no signs of damage. Chief was never so gentle with her sneakers; the soaking shoes weren’t his doing.

The majority of the apartment building had been searched; Chief was still missing. The only placed Reese hadn’t looked were the basements—Reese had never ventured down there. Her gut told her that if she had never taken Chief down there, he wouldn’t know how to get to the basements. Then again, he loved riding in elevators. An open door was more than enough invitation for him. No matter where the elevator was leading, Chief was aboard for the ride. If he happened to catch someone going down, Reese had doubt that he had tagged along. Plus, she was running out of ideas. If her puppy wasn’t in the basement, he could be anywhere in the city. If he caught the front doors open, his giant paws could have carried him anywhere.

The little B1 button glowed on the elevator as the doors trapped Reese inside. She preferred to take the stairs; elevators were a bit unreliable, but this was the only way to get to the basement. Much to her relief, it wasn’t a long ride down. Before she knew it, the doors chimed open, revealing a strange world. It looked more like a junkyard rather than the basement in an apartment complex. The floor was covered in scrap metal, exposed wires, and pools of metallic liquids. This was the reason Reese never visited the basement; it had all the makings of a good horror movie. Like a paranoid little girl, she checked over bother shoulders before barely stepping out of the elevator. She wasn’t brave enough to move too far away from her transportation back to the world above.

Not seeing anyone else on a first glance, Reese let out a high-pitched whistle—a trick she learned after volunteering at shelters for so long. All dogs responded to a whistle. With any luck, Chief would show up.

[TETRIS]

MICAH "MECHA" DEAN

ooc// @ Spade, if you read this. No, Rodric is NOT to blame. But Mecha doesn't know that. And since he's an irritable diva and attention-whore, he's going to blame his fellow mechanic.

bic// Something was wrong with the generator. Very, very wrong.

The two large disks wired in parallel were magnetised, set up like that to reroute electricity from the telephone lines that ran close by. They usually churned with a steady metallic bass thump.

Right now, it sounded more like an asthmatic epilepsy victim suffering a seizure. Great shuddering chokes, syncopated sobs backed with growls, and a rattling gurgle, before the noise started all over again.

"Piece of shit!" Mecha wasn't talking about the generator, either. No, it wasn't anything wrong with the design. It was more the tangle of lines, one plug dangling loose with stray sparks flickering at the end. Someone, or something, had fugged with the connections.

And he had a good idea who. "That bastard," he swore to himself. "Bodric or Modric or how about NOT-a-fugging-mechanic?!" Well, Mr. Masters in Engineering may have a fugging piece of paper to show for his trouble, but a fancy diploma did NOT make a mechanic.

Mecha'd built the thing. From scrap. This is why he repeatedly asked Gladstone for the sole key to the basement. Because he hated when people came in here, willy-nilly, and fugged with his projects.

Gladstone had obliged by posting a warning that tampering with the generators could be fatal. In Mecha's opinion, Gladstone had completely missed the point. Screw the civilian casualties - his work was vandalized!

Reaching in with his right arm, he watched the sparks play around the metal casing. A normal human would have to shut off the power to the building before fixing this; Mecha discharged the electricity through his gauntlet, touching the ground with one steel claw to ground himself. He started rewiring the device, muttering venomous curses under his breath.

A sudden, high-pitched whistle startled him. He jabbed the plug into the socket, a brief explosion of blue-white light flashing before the lights overhead flickered, wheezed, then came on.

Mecha turned to the intruder, a barrage of insults and abuses poised on his tongue.

It's a girl...

The lights caught her grey eyes strangely from his angle, half-crouched as he was. Her eyes looked like steel. No, like fine titanium. Dark grey, but with a smooth, almost oil texture of excellent grade metal.

"What are you doing here?" As soon as he said it, he realized how rude and offensive it sounded. Not that he cared about being rude or offensive, but she seemed startled and alert already.

"Who are you?" That didn't sound any better. Well, Mecha'd tried his best. He just wasn't cut out for normal communication. He allowed himself a snicker. Isn't that hilarious? First question I ask her, is what she's doing in my territory. Then who she is. Willa was right. I don't care about people at all. Except to notice them and bare my fangs when they get in my way.

That's how I like it.

"I don't like whistling," he informed her. "That's why I disconnected the alarms." He gestured vaguely to a smoke detector paired with an alarm near the elevator.

[Angie]

There was a reason Reese never attempted to explore the basements. The poorly lit room was a real life obstacle course. If you wanted to make it to the other side of the room, you had to avoid exposed electrical wires, step over puddles and puddles of leaked oil, and duck under disconnected pipelines. In other words, the basements (or at least the top basement, Reese didn’t dare go any further into the belly of the apartment building) weren’t very welcoming. It was apparent that whoever was in charge of the building’s maintenance had his work cut out for him.

Already on edge, the explosion of white and blue sparks followed by the flickering of what few lights were overhead was almost enough to make the girl yelp in fear. Usually she wasn’t one to let her imagination get the best of her, but the eerie feel of the basement was enough to send a hair-raising chill down her spine and cause her to double check over both of her shoulders before she dared to step farther away from the lift.

Just as she took a few, very hesitant steps forward, a shuffling from deeper within the basement caught her attention. Upon her first glance, she had concluded that no one else was in the basement. She thought the movement had been cause by Chief. Or better, she’d hoped. This was the longest the pooch had ever disappeared for; and always before, he had turned up in one of his usual hiding spots. Now she understood why the puppy’s previous owners had deemed him ‘too much to handle’.

Imagine Reese’s surprise when it wasn’t her lost pooch that emerged, but a man.

For a moment, Reese only responded with an arched eyebrow as she was bombarded with questions. It seemed almost hopeless to try to get a word in until the stranger was finished. They weren’t unusual questions; but the manner in which they were asked were. He wasn’t merely asking for information. It sounded more like he was demanding it.

His first question was fairly simple. The only reason she was down here was to find a lost pup. She had no intention of stealing his scrap metal or ruining his work. Causing the electrical malfunction had been unintentional. Whoops.

“My puppy snapped his leash. I thought he might have found his way down here.” With her hands buried in her jeans pockets, Reese rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. Aloud, her answer sounded ridiculous; dogs couldn’t use the elevator—but she had looked everywhere else.

The second question was much easier to answer.

“I’m Reese. I live upstairs.” Something told her that he wasn’t one to shake hands, so she didn’t make a move forward. “Sorry about the whistling. I didn’t mean to bother anyone.”

[TETRIS]

MICAH "MECHA" DEAN

Her explanation and introduction were met by a grunt. He turned around, screwing in the last plug and clipping a metal half-ring over it and its neighbour, hopefully to prevent further tampering.

"I have a room upstairs," he offered at last, straightening out and turning around. It didn't occur to him to give her his name. People generally called him whatever they cared to. He'd heard everything from 'bastard' to 'you' to 'mechanic'. It's not like any particular label held more appeal for him. He was as likely to answer or not to any "name".

"Hn. Don't you shift into something? Any animal can track down a dog better than you."

That sounded vaguely rude, but Mecha couldn't be bothered to mull over his words, looking for where he'd gone wrong. He picked up a pair of tough leather gloves and slipped them over both hands, starting towards the girl. He stared intently at her eyes, noting the odd shape of the pupil.

Sounds like it's happened before. Tche. People are so dumb. If it happened to me twice, I'd made a new leash. I could help her with one.

He paused near an old Harley Davidson, the sleek beautiful antique neatly displayed in several piles of hubcaps, tires, tire rims, handles, and the engine by itself, propped in a corner. Casually rifting through the metal, Mecha grabbed a hubcap rim with sloping sides. Given her puppy and a blowtorch, he could reliably create a tight-fitting collar that no dog would be able to shake.

A small nub on the inside edge, where ideally a nozzle could be hooked to inflate a tire, would do handily to attach some wire to. Bailing wire, 0.02 diameter ... he took a coil, unwrapped half the length and wound it about the protrusion as he walked over to Reese.

He showed her the thing.

"'t would make a good leash. Wire cutters, let alone a dog, can't break this wire." He had a bunch of it, after unravelling five metres of thick, insulated telephone cable. Peeled the rubber casing off, and separated the twisted cables inside into individual strands. Mecha waved a blowtorch vaguely as he talked, demonstrating how easy it would be to customize the accessory. "Fit it around his neck, write his name on the collar, and clip the wire on."

And just in case she was worried, "Wire's not thick enough to conduct a lethal current," he reassured.

[Angie]

To say the least, this unpredicted encounter was awkward. Being in the basement had already thrown Reese out of her comfort zone; plus, this basement-dweller was like no one else she had ever met. She had expected him to introduce himself after she had given her name. It soon became obvious that he had no intention of sharing his name. And calling her new acquaintance ‘hey, you!’ would only make things more awkward.

“You have a room; do you have a name?”

Most people would have offered a name, first or last, before they offered to announce to a complete stranger where they lived. However, Reese assumed that the strange man was a shifter, too. It wasn’t often that outsiders were aloud within the ‘shifter’s apartment complex. This mechanic, electrician, whatever he was—he was one of them. At his will, he could contort his entire form into that of a foreign species. All of the tenants here were ‘shifters. It made for interesting living arrangements. It wasn’t unusual to find a Bengal tiger or a zebra strutting down the hallway.

Living in the Verge apartments made it obvious that Reese was a shifter. While ‘shifting in itself was amazing; Reese was a little less impressive than most. Her ‘other half’ wasn’t rare or exotic, she couldn’t fly or breathe underwater; a house cat was far from overwhelming. Sure, her senses were heightened and she never failed to land on her feet, but that was as far as the perks went. In her shifted form, Reese would have no problem tracking down her escaped mutt; the problems would unfold after she found him.

It was no secret that dogs weren’t on their best behavior when a cat was near. Scared of how poor Chief would react to his master becoming a feline, Reese had avoided shifting for the last few weeks. Before she ever took that risk, she had to make sure that he was well trained. The fact that he was missing made it obvious that he wasn’t yet. He was a curious animal; always wanting to explore. He liked to learn.

“I do,” was all that Reese offered, maneuvering slightly to gain a better view of what he was doing. A slight pause followed; his intense stare had caught her off-guard. It only lasted a second. As soon as Reese had lifted her eyes to meet his, the man was off.

He was shuffling through what appeared to Reese as nothing more than a large stack of garbage. However, he seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. What he pulled out looked like nothing more than trash, but he seemed to be pleased. Swiftly, he moved around the basement; he was constantly tinkering with whatever it was. It still looked like a hunk of junk to Reese. For the stranger’s sake, she faked a small smile.

When he was finished, Reese finally realized what he had been making the whole time: a collar and a leash. Mind you, it was nothing like what was sold in Petsmart stores. It looked strong, yes; but it was nothing she was going to wrap around her dog’s neck. Plus, her hand was going to be on the under end of that wire. After a long walk, the fabric of a tough leash shredded into her hand; Reese could only imagine the damage that would be caused by a wire.

“Oh. Thanks.” Her reply was more than a little awkward. A rim and wire? Not to sound rude, Reese continued, “There’s only one problem. My dog’s still missing.”
[/b]

[TETRIS]

MICAH "MECHA" DEAN

"Mecha," he replied. "Although, having a room is more practical than having a name."

He found her question bemusing, her own sparse response to his question a bit hypocritical. She hadn't offered a shift species, but he wasn't keen on prying either, lest he should have to explain that he was technically no longer a shifter. The ability hadn't escaped him, but he hardly liked to consider what the twisting bone and ligaments in his shoulder would do to the carefully wired precision of his arm.

Almost subconsciously, he rolled his shoulder, feeling the rough fabric of his vest skim the hard scales that were melted to the metal. It would have been nearly impossible to maintain a partial shift, under any circumstance, but these scales were basically dead keratin, treated with flame.

The girl's response to his suggestion and invention puzzled him. Mecha furrowed his brow, glancing from the leash to her face, then back. Granted, her dog was still missing... but he'd given her a perfectly reasonable solution to finding the mutt, and a good way to ensure no encore of this apparently familiar episode.

Did she want him to add a tracking device? Or did she want him to (god forbid) help her find the dog?

Seeing as he didn't know what to make of her - Mecha constantly thought he'd pegged her, labelled her, figured her out, but then she did something else or said something that would plunge him into confusion again. Or maybe, it was just that all females behaved this way. It couldn't hurt to ask her. At least he'd get a definitive answer that way.

He tapped the rim thoughtfully, then threaded his fingers through some of the screw holes, gauging room for an antenna and scanning chip.

"... you want me to add GPS to this? It'd only be valid for a twenty mile radius ..." Mecha hesitated, tipping his head to the side to watch Reese, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully.

Oh. He thought he knew what the problem was.

"If you're worried about being naked, you could bring a shirt with you."

He waved the blowtorch and makeshift leash.

"Or I'll follow you. Saves you from shifting back at all, and I'll collar your pup on the spot."

Mecha's eyes wandered around the basement, stopping at some steel slates, bolts, and other scraps as he scanned his full inventory. "Have you considered a cage?" Wouldn't be too hard to make a cage. Practically a bigger safe. He could put a combination lock on it as well; Reese could be damn sure that her dog wouldn't escape.