Alister's storage unit

[Narg]

Followed from this thread

Alister floated above his body in the garbled dissociative world surrounding him, millions of reflections of his phones and bottles of gin floating about in his vision. He had learned that oftentimes it was best to wait these out. It would finish eventually and he would be able to go to sleep. At least it usually would, had Alister not sensed through his odd daze that someone was banging at his door.

The sounds were muffled and distant, as if down a long cavernous hallway, *bmmf bmmf bmmf* "c'mon Alist… Open up I... talk to you... we mean... --arm to you... --air it to yo--…" *bmmf bmmf bmmf* "Plea--… orry we didn't--… this bad. You there bu--…"

[Alister Rockwell]

The big man managed to raise an arm, enchanted my a floating pane of glass reflecting a thousand lighters. Non-existent fingers brushed against a non-existent surface and set it spinning, until it spun itself apart and shattered into a million more scenes of gin and lighter and gun and blanket. These fragments blazed like a meteorshower to land below him, sealing together to once again show the sight of his sleeping body, lit cigarette burning on the concrete floor as a shattered bottle of gin leaked its contents out beside his head.

He wanted to shout "go away!" at the source of the noise, and maybe he did, but he couldn't know, because the Alister below him looked almost peaceful, asleep, pallid as his skin was, drenched in sweat and shaking. No, he wasn't peaceful, he was dying - maybe that would be his final moments, he would get to watch the life ebb out of him from a different point of view. Maybe that wasn't so bad? Good riddance, maybe some homeless man would find his guns and make a fortune off of them, he'd accomplish something in his death, more than the subsistence he had accomplished in his life.

He would have been content to watch himself, but the pounding just wouldn't go away, and the reptile in the back of his brain told his body something was wrong.

((Alister spends a Willpower point to wake up. He has 5 starting Willpower and now has 4 remaining.))

His reptile brain shouted at his body, and a streak of awareness shattered the myriad panes entrancing him in his disembodied state. In that moment of awareness, Alister realised he had to wake up, get up, and he reached down to seize the hand of his sleeping form.

With a deep, panicked inhalation, Alister's eyes opened and he threw the blanket off, reaching for his gun.

[Narg]

"--In there we just want to talk to you. Geez you don't even need to open up. It's Eddy. Listen I know you don't wanna fight and we don't either, just... just tell us who that motherfucker is and Why he's lookin' for you. Please Alister, he said he'll keep coming till we tell him where you are. I don't trust the fucker to leave us alive if he finds any of us. We gotta work together Alister. It's just me, Lucien, and Allen left. Please for fucks sake just talk to us!"

Alister had never heard Eddy like this. Usually his voice was filled with bravado and reckless edge, phony, but present. For once in his life Eddy sounded sincere. He sounded terrified, like a fox running out of options in the wood.

"C'mon Eddy, he's not in there. The records in the office must have been wrong, let's just go." Alister heard Lucien's voice say with worry and anxiety.

"Yeah," a smaller voice concurred, "And besides... he comes at night. I don't wanna be next, Eddy. I don't wanna be next! Let's just go to some hotel bar and wait the night out, he won't come for us if there are other people I bet." This voice didn't sound as familiar to Alister but was easily recognizable as Allen, Eddy's books guy.

"No! He's here I know it! This is the place. Please! Please, Ali! I'm sorry we cut you loose! He's coming for you too!" Eddy continued to bang on the door, this time fully audible to Alister, now that he wasn't dissociating.

[Alister Rockwell]

Alister's instinctive first thought was Fuck I hate when people call me 'Ali'. He'd put the last guy who'd done so in the ER, although that was more due to their history than Alister being a psycho about a nickname. But he'd never heard any so panicked - they hadn't worked together long, but in his time as one of his men Eddy had been trying to act like he was in charge, even when things went wrong he'd kept up a facade of control and power. One that had been easy to see through, mind, but one nonetheless. And he had Lucien had had a few jobs together and the guy had been cool as ice, collected. So if something had gotten this far under Eddy's skin, and even Lucien was coming off worried...

Well, if they gunned him down they'd just be saving him a lot of trouble. 

Why would they want to kill me anyway? the rational part of Alister's mind finally asked, unclouded somewhat thanks to the wonder of painkillers and gin. And really, he couldn't think of a reason - if anything, Alister was the one who should be going after them.

He got out of bed slowly, shakily, and then scooped up the 9mm. The mixing of medication and alcohol lead to him stumbling and banging against the chair, the abrupt noise quieting the pounding on the door and the voices inside. Parting the curtains, Alister went to the door and keyed in the code to unlock it. But he decided to be prudent and, if he was about to get shot down, put himself in a position to take at least one of them with him. Reaching down, he lifted up the shutter door, stepped back, and levelled the gun to aim as the door slid away.

He kept his trigger finger close to but noticeably off the trigger, but he needn't have bothered - his arm was still shaking so much he couldn't have hit anything if he tried. When he beheld the sorry state of the three men who had come to his door, one missing his hand, the other's arm in a sling, and all with faces ranging from concern to panic, he let the gun drop.

"Hey Eddy," he greeted weakly. "Sorry about the gun, I'm uh...not a morning person. What's this about...shit...fuck...uh...fuck...what's going on?"

[Narg]

"Oh thank god you're alive Alister." Allen sighed as the gun was lowered. He was missing a hand. It looked as if it had been cut clean off with brute force and a dull edge, like that of an office paper cutter, which it had.

"You almost look worse than us." Lucien commented. His whole arm was purple and his fingers were nigh unrecognizable. It looked like it had been broken and then crushed by a slamming door multiple times, which it had.

"Thank God you opened the door. I'll get right to fuckin point" Eddy said, in a semi-relieved yet still hurried tone. "Listen there's this Maniac about who's been looking for you. He came to us one day, said Handley told us you had been working for us before, wanted to know where you was. Knowledge is valuable so we wouldn't give you up without payment, I'm sure you understand. Anyways the monster wouldn't pay us for your whereabouts and he told us, by the end, that we should reconsider... Ricky pulled a fucking gun... My God... trying to be some fucking gangster, Scare him, I dunno, only Allen saw." Ricky had a bloodied bandage over one eye. It looked like it had been stabbed out with a pencil, which it had.

"He moved so fast... He grabbed the gun out of Ricky's hand and hit him with it and his head just... it just... It just spun around. Like an Owl." Allen got quiet at the last bit, and it quickly became clear to Alister that this was not the end of the tale. This was clear simply from the expression on the accountants pale face, almost at the verge of tears.

"You could hear it from the other room" Lucien said. "The cracking sound, the yelling, the gunfire. He blasted away all our boys, four of em with Ricky's gun, beat two of them to death with a lamp. I tried to keep him from coming in to Eddy but he grabbed my arm and snapped it like a twig. Let's just say he had some questions after that..." Allen winced at the thought and seemed to almost throw up as he gingerly held the bandaged stump at the end of his arm.

"We didn't know where you were." Eddy chimed in. "It's not like we kept tabs on you or anything. But we knew you got your guns and ammo from somewhere. After what he did to us we knew it wasn't safe to go back to the office, he knew where we operated from. So we figured we'd find you, tell you about this maniac, and work with you to take him down --your... superior fire power and all-- and save all our asses in the process."

[Alister Rockwell]

"I...uh...what?"

Alister could scarcely believe what he was hearing. "So not only am I fucking dying, I've got the goddamn Terminator trying to chase me down as well? What the fuck did I do to deserve this?" he spat out, speaking less to the men in front of him and more to some imagined, omnipresent creator. "You guys can't be fucking serious."

He met Eddy's gaze. "Christ, you are serious. I just...what the..."

He trailed off, and leaned against the doorway for support. If the damned T-1000 had taken out all of Eddy's goons that easily, what chance did sickly, dying Alister and the tattered remnants of the already-fucked-up have?

Mind you, the chance of a quick death from getting his neck-snapped was starting to sound pretty appealing. And he was pretty sick of bad news - no bitching about it, if things wanted to just fall apart all around him, he'd scream and kick and swear until they crushed him too. 

As he kept reminding himself, he literally had nothing to lose at this point.

"You know what? Fine. Dickhead wants to come after a dead man, we can at least try and get some company for the trip to hell. Come on in."

He drew back the first curtain, revealing his armoury. 

"Take your pick, hell, you can keep it too, I'm not going to need any of this in about two months. Anything but the lever-action and the sawn-off - they're mine."

[Narg]

All eyes in the storage unit widened, save for the one that had been gouged out. The sheer size of Alister's collective armory was truly staggering, especially to the group of wannabee gangsters who simply expected Alister to have a piece or two hidden away somewhere. Their part-time muscle was far better armed than they could have ever hoped.

"Holy shit, Alister." Eddy muttered in befuddled amazement. "Jesus Christ... We might stand a fucking chance!" 

Whether or not this was actually the case was in more contention than the armory indicated. Alister knew by just looking at these guys that they weren't going to be able to even use half the armory. Both Allen and Lucien were relegated to using pistol weaponry, hand cannons at the most, with both of their arms somehow out of commission. And Allen was missing his dominant right hand. Shooting would be especially tough for him. And even though Eddy could hold a bigger gun, his right eye was gouged out. Aiming would be particularly difficult for him. Not to mention that Alister could barely hold his arm straight, and might be jittering so bad that if he actually kept his finger on the trigger it might go off at any time.

"We should just hole up here." Allen whimpered, looking through the various pistols on Alister's racks. "I may not be a gunman like you guys, but I still don't think that guy can get through steel." He said pointing at the door. "Here is our safest bet."

"We've gotta go out and get this guy." Eddy retorted, picking up what looked like an AR15, and started checking the gun and doing maintenance. "If we just sit around he's gonna find us and then find a way to deal with whatever defenses we put up. Besides, he's expecting us to go run and hide. He thinks he's the hunter. Well lets show him he's fucking wrong." With that Eddy put in a clip, and readied the weapon. "It's hot now by the way." Eddy remarked nodding at the gun.

Normally Eddy wasn't this brash. It was very clear to Alister that he was a mixture of rattled and high on adrenaline. Just after Alister noted this, Lucien spoke up, "Hey, the guy's after Alister. I think he makes the call."

"Like hell he does!" Eddy shouted, clearly agitated. "I'm still in charge here! I've got a handle on this. We got the guns now we--"

"Shut up, Eddy! You're rattled. We all are. Alister knows what's going on, and he's the only one here thinking straight, and it's his ass on the line!" Lucien barked back at Eddy, shutting him up. "Just cuz we got guns doesn't mean a damn thing if we don't play this with a cool head."

"I... I agree... I agree with Lucien." Allen piped up, putting a clip in a Glock that he found. "Alister is the only one here who can think this through objectively." Allen seemed to be a rather calculating sort of guy, and with a gun in his hand it looked like some of his confidence and rationality was coming back. "Us three aren't thinking straight. We're letting our fear cloud our judgement. Who knows maybe that guy just got lucky. So, we need to hear what Alister thinks at least, he's helping us and this directly effects him."

The morale in the room was certainly increasing, and the three mobsters seemed to be cooling off. With that, Eddy turned to Alister, looked him in the eye, and said, "O.K. then. Fair's fair. What do you think we should do Alister?" 

[Alister Rockwell]

Alister wasn't really paying attention. Resting against a rack of guns, he was focused on his sense of smell, and something peculiar he had gotten a whiff of.

"Hang on...do you smell that? Smells like-OH SHIT!"

Pushing himself off of the gun rack, he hurried to the back of the gun area and wrenched open the curtain, cursing. A small fire had started where the gin had seeped out of the shattered bottle to meet the still-smouldering cigarette. "Fuck fuck fuck," Alister cursed - the edge of the blanket had already caught alight. Grabbing it by one end, he folded it over itself to smother the burning part and then through the whole thing on the small pool of fire and began stamping on it to put the fire out.

When it was finally out, Alister sank into the folding chair. "That...that was my last bottle," he moaned. Disease, the terminator, and now he didn't even had a drink to make it go down easier. The other men had come to the curtain and were looking at him expectantly. Feeling slightly more bereft, Alister shook his head, and shook off the loss of his main comfort.

"Alright. We need a plan? Let's...ambush the fucker. Let's bet he follows you here or finds this locker - we'll tell Andy where we're going, watch and wait for him to turn up, pop his kneecaps before he can get close, then ask some questions of our own. Let me think."

He rubbed his temples. The painkillers had helped a lot, but that didn't mean thinking or remembering was easy, just less painful. "How about...what was that old pub, the one in Swenton that burnt down a few months back? Eddy, you had me oversee a few trades there? They were gonna knock down the three-story next to it, should be a skeleton, we can watch for him from there, shoot his caps out as he walks up to the pub before he even knows we're there."

[Narg]

"See I told you that's what we should do!" Eddy said triumphantly. "We'll take our car. I like the way you think, Alister. Should've given you a better shake when we were... Um, you know. Never mind. We've got a fucker to hunt down."

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls perception + alertness to make a sight based roll. Difficulty 8 because it is night time and very dark out.
eguLEMZep_ p_p_p__
One success

As Alister and the, quite literal, gang moved to the car and past the empty guard post, he saw a dim glow on the ground a good couple of yards away from the attendants box. He walked over and discovered that it was a still lit, barely smoked cigarette. Andy's brand.

"Whatcha doin' Alister?" Lucien called over. "There's no one there. Your guy must just be taking a smoke break. We've got a psycho to cap. Car's this way."

The three armed goons moved quickly to the car, checking around them as they got in. The engine flared to life and sat Idle, waiting for Alister to get in the Car.
···

[Alister Rockwell]

Cabrillos...Andy's brand. Good shit too.

Alister took a drag of the cigarette, and straightened up.

"Give me a...gimme a second," Alister called. "We need Andy to tell this terminator asshole where to find us."

He headed back to the attendant's office to double check they hadn't missed him, taking the chance to switch the burner phone over to silent mode as he did so. Having your phone go off while you were trying to get the drop on somebody wasn't an incident he wanted to repeat. Poking his head through the open window, Alister saw that it was empty, and called out, "Andy? Where are you?"

Another drag of the cigarette, and he tried to think things through. Andy loved his smoke breaks, but he wasn't the sort to just disappear in the middle of his shift. Probably in the bathroom - but he wouldn't have just tossed the cigarette away unsmoked. Maybe he'd seen something and dropped it? Nah, not likely.

Alister's gaze fell on the security monitor showing the camera feeds that still worked in the facility, and he had an idea. He turned back to the car and held up three fingers, then tried the door. He expected it to be unlocked based on Andy having just stepped out - if it wasn't, well, fuck, I think I have a lockpick on me? Once inside, he'd check the security footage to see if he could see where Andy had vanished off to. Alister guessed that he could try leaving a note, but that would take an agonizing amount of time to write - maybe a message on the computer, that'd be marginally faster.

[Narg]

The door wasn't locked. Alister walked into the small box to find a lunch box, a computer, a paper register of the storage units, and crumbs all over the ground. Alister looked in the small wastebasket to find at least fifteen nature valley bar wrappers. Seems like Andy had more than one vice. 

Getting into the attendants office was nowhere close to an ordeal, but getting into the computer was. It was password protected with a horridly boring, yet novel, pong screensaver. There was a small desk drawer built into the booth. Inside was a half used packet of sticky notes, a half eaten box of nicotine gum that hadn't been touched in what looked like ages, and a wild assortment of clear bodied ballpoint pens

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls investigation + wits difficulty 6

5qjIgj0Zp_p_p_p_p_
One success!

Alister stopped to think for a minute and put two and two together. Andy wasn't the sort who cared much about doing his job particularly well, five libra an hour not being a particularly inspiring motivator. He wouldn't even bother to remember the password. Andy would have it written somewhere. Alister ran his hand underneath the pulled out drawer and felt a sticky note attached. He pulled it off and looked at the random assortment of numbers, symbols, and various cases of letters, clearly randomly generated. He typed it into the computer and the security screens came to life.

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls technology + intelligence to find and play back the recent recordings, difficulty 6

p_p_p_
no successes.

Alister hadn't used this system before and couldn't seem to figure out where to find the playback footage. He clicked through various windows and files but couldn't seem to get it to work. Eventually he exited out of the various windows and went back to looking at the screen. He figured a smart fellow like Allen might be able to figure it out but the system just seemed to befuddle Alister's drug addled head.

·······

[Alister Rockwell]

Alister shrugged. Andy was probably fine, nobody really checked the cameras or his hours so he probably ducked off all the time. Chances were he'd left the cigarette on the windowsill or something and it had been blown off by a breeze. Still on the computer, he brought up Notepad and shakily typed a message.

"fobwe4 t6i0 t6gwe4 sem,io0jkuibhgft nmy8usekjle5r6 iuonj sww34enion 0- terwkl;kl awbnionbwe4 q3wghio awasdjkew,. awlosertr"

After a some significant usage of the backspace key, he managed to whittle that down to the much more legible "fowe t0 twe smokihg muske6 in swenon 0- tell anion who ask. alstr"

That took an embarrassingly long time, so he he hurried to the car and hopped in as soon as he was done. His guns went in the boot, and he took the front passenger seat. "Alright, I left a message so Andy'll know where we are. Let's get going."

[Narg]

"Took you long enough." Eddy said, hitting the gas even before Alister was buckled in. The car took off down the road passing under streetlamp after streetlamp.

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls perception + Alertness difficulty 9

X8XR_xlSp_p_p_p_p_
A botch. The next Perception based roll that Alister makes will be at -1 to the dice pool

Alister thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye just as they were driving away. He tried to focus his eyes but the usual delirium made it near impossible. The harder he tried to focus the worse his head began to feel. He started to see spots in his vision and eventually gave up as the car went down the road. His head throbbed and the spots persisted. Alister wished he hadn't broken his last bottle of gin.

They pulled up to where Alister thought an almost burned down pub was in Swenton. Where The Smoking Musket used to be sat an entirely new bar, The Thirsty gull. The building must have been bought up by a different developer after the old owner made out on fire insurance. The new place was actually pretty nice for Swenton. The remains of the building next door would be perfect to hide in and get a vantage point from.

They parked around back, but it was late enough that the place was just closing up. All the stools were up on the tables, and the barkeep was wiping everything down. They got out of the car and started heading into the skeleton of the half demolished apartment building beside it. Alister lead them up the rafters, slowly and carefully due to the out of commission limbs. 

"I'll post up right here." Eddy said. "I have the most accurate gun, and only I can use it with any ease. You guys shack up downstairs to put him at gunpoint once I blow his caps out."

The crew nodded and went downstairs into the bottom area of the almost demolished building. They waited for hours. The first thing they saw was the bar staff leaving at about one thirty in the morning, going behind the alley and driving off. The night got colder and colder as time went by. Alister could see Allen getting visibly nervous, and Lucien was his usual composed self. 

Alister felt himself almost dissociate from the stress multiple times. He was able to catch himself as it happened though. The drugs really seemed to be helping, and even when he felt himself floating through the kaleidoscope, Lucien would give him a shove, noticing that he was spacing out.

The moon passed above them and seemed to smile mockingly down at the four men lying in wait. The moon sunk behind the horizon, and before the four of them knew it, they could see the sky turning indigo, then grey, and finally a budding light blue. It had been many hours and dawn was upon them. Cars started driving about, only a few at this early hour, getting to early morning shifts. The ambushers saw men park their cars in the alley behind them. The wore work gloves and went into the construction offices next to the building. A couple more began to arrive wearing neon vests, work gloves, and highlighter colored helmets ready to start the day.

····

[Alister Rockwell]

Truth was, Alister had fallen asleep a bit before dawn. Some part of him had become painfully aware that nothing was going to happen tonight, and he'd allowed himself to drift off slumped against a bare stone wall, as exhausted as he had been. He roused when Allen nudged him, feeling stiff and painfully hot, and much worse than he had when he dozed off an hour ago.

Taking a look at the colour of the sky, and the arriving workers, he cursed. "G-guns in hiding," he yawned. "Allen, go...go grab Eddy, quickly."

He rubbed his temples - his headache was back. "We'll circle back around to the car. Christ, what a waste of a night. I'm starting to have my doubts about your terminator buddy, I didn't see shit last night.

He took off his jacket and wrapped his guns in it, shivering in the cold morning air. Still, cold was better than having the fuzz called on them by the construction workers. He didn't wait for the others - the long, empty night had given him plenty of time to stew on their story, and the more he'd thought about it, the more preposterous it sounded. Frankly, he was starting to think they'd had too much blow or acid and seen shit, probably gone too hard and fucked each other up without realising - now that he'd had a night to think about it, the thought of a man who could punch a man so hard their neck snapped and then kill four men all blasting at him just sounded like a total load of shit.

He tried to move with haste, but if the construction workers caught him, hopefully all they'd see was a sickly bum they'd try to run off anyway.

Jesus Christ. What a waste of a night.

Now all he could think of was lifting a bottle of something hard on the way home, curling up under a warm blanket, and forgetting the whole stupid affair.

[Narg]

Eddy had fallen asleep at his post too. All the anxious men shuffled out of the deconstruction site. The workers didn't seem to pay them much mind. Bums were not a rare occurrence, and as long as they left the site early the workers didn't really give a shit, probably getting just above five Libra and all. 

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls Wits + alertness difficulty 4
00BjSiWTp_p_p_p_
Two successes!

As the men went around the back alley to where the car was, Alister remembered that they were behind a bar. He stopped near the recycling bins and managed to convince Lucien, for the waste of his time, to at least help him get some dregs of hard alcohol mixed together. After searching, with Lucien's help, he got a good mix of gin, vodka, and various whiskies in an empty bottle of jack. It was almost full to the top. It would taste like shit, but holy hell it would be good enough. Eventually one of the workers came around and shooed them off. They didn't have any business here any longer anyways.

They got in the car, and Alister asked to be dropped off back at his storage unit. The three gangsters rode in silence, each of them sorely aware that nothing had happened. Eventually Allen spoke up, "You know, in Tsun-Zu's The Art of War he says he would rely on the enemy being ready for a perceived attack to wear them out."

"Shut up Allen. Not the time." Lucien said, glaring over at his handless friend. "We should just be lucky we're alive to see the morning."

As they pulled up to the curb in front of the storage units and Alister got out of the car, Eddy rolled down the window and called out to Alister, "Thanks for the guns, but that fucker is still out there. Your terminator friend, you may not believe us now, but he exists. Watch yourself buddy."

Just as Alister was coming back he saw Andy walking groggily up to the attendants booth from somewhere inside the open air complex storage units. He got in the booth and opened the computer. "Hey, Alister! This looks like your name here, and from the shaking it looks like your shitty typing. Fuck'r you trying to tell me?" Andy looked a little worse for wear. He was squinting and holding his head as he looked at the computer screen. 

SPOILER: Click to show

Alister rolls Perception + alertness difficulty 6
p_p_p_p_
Three successes.

Andy, a short but wiry guy, had a massive bruise forming, just barely visible, from under his buzzed hairline. It looked as if the blow had come from almost directly above him, and he seemed to be holding his head just around that area. Alister also noticed that there was a little bit of blood on Andy's collar, only barely visible against the Navy. Andy also seemed unusually pale and groggy. The guy was normally spry in the mornings; he was practically nocturnal after all.


·······