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Chapter Fifty-Six — Picking Skills
Chapter Fifty-Six — Picking Skills "Right... well, we know where to look next time, I guess," Jenny said. She adjusted her mask, then shook her head. I had the feeling she was one part frustrated and one part annoyed. Two not-so-distinct emotions."We can always come back," Sharp said. "Unless this wall is a complete no-go?""It's not," Alissa replied. "I might... maybe be able to take down the wall with a spell, but I don't have a lot of confidence in doing it in a way that wouldn't be obvious to every sensor in the area and every mage within a mile.""That wouldn't be very subtle," Sharp said. "Even a small bomb might be less noticable if it's down here."Alyssa nodded. "I'd rather not risk it. And honestly? I'm a little tired from all the walking around in circles.""Hey, I know where to go this time," Jenny said. "I think we can find an easier way here next time. Just pop the right manhole in some alley and bam, we'll be here again in five minutes." She looked up at the ceiling, then cursed. "But getting back to where we started is going to be a bitch.""Then just any exit?" Sharp asked. "And then we take an autocab back to the start?""An autocab? Do I look like I'm made of gold?" Jenny asked.Alyssa waved her down. "It's fine. We can cover that much. Let's get going?"And with that said, we started to head on out of there. Jenny mumbled the entire time, but eventually found a fork in the tunnel that led back into the storm drains and finally to a slime-covered ladder leading up to a manhole cover.I hopped up onto Sharp's shoulder as she climbed up and to the manhole, then pushed it up with her back until it squealed aside. We exited out into an alley with only a couple of itinerants there to stare at us. They didn't seem willing to try anything, not when three very suspicious youths in pale blue PPE stuffed their way out of the ground.Alyssa called for a cab, and all three of them undressed while waiting for it to show up. The balled-up suits were tossed into the trash, but Sharp collected the masks. They would usually be a little too expensive to just throw away, so we had to take them back with us as part of the charade."I'm going to take so many showers when I get back," Sharp complained."Yeah, tell me about it," Jenny said. "So... same time tomorrow?""Ah, I can't, I'm working tomorrow. But if you guys want help, then I'll be available on Thursday!" Sharp said."That's inconvenient," Alyssa replied."I can bring more safety equipment with me, and a sledgehammer," Sharp said. "Plus, I bet I'm cheaper than just about anyone else you could hire to help on this kind of gig, and you know that I'm discreet.""Sure you are," Jenny said.Their autocab arrived, and the three of them, and myself, filed into the back. Usually I'd make some effort to hide so that the taxi wouldn't detect a cat and apply a surcharge for it, but we weren't the ones paying.Fortunately, we weren't that far from the river where we started off. Just a few miles at most. Those few miles overland were a lot shorter than the same distance underground through winding tunnels and the like."So, not free tomorrow, huh?" Jenny asked. "When can you be here on Thursday?""Uh, early, I guess. I'm staying..." she paused as my nails gently reminded her about the value of discretion. "Just on the edge of the city. So I can come here early, but not super early. I have a bike from the courier company I work for to get around. And the bus, I guess.""Cool. I think we're okay with that. Be here for eight. And bring that hammer you mentioned," Jenny said. "And bring a gun if you've got one.""A gun?" Sharp asked. She turned her head hard to the side. Jenny, being the shortest, was relegated to the middle seat between Sharp and Aylssa. She wasn't wearing her belt, because she was young and stupid, of course."Yeah, you've seen those before, right?" Jenny asked. "You... do you own a gun? This is still America."Sharp nodded. "I mean, sure, I have a few, but I didn't think this job would call for a gun at all."Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more."I mean, if you're going to help us break through that wall, you might as well help us the rest of the way. Whoever is paying you for info will pay you for a lot more if you get some from the inside, right?""Maybe," Sharp said. "Look, I'll see if there's a better price for that, but I have the feeling that if you break in and steal whatever it is that they want to begin with, they won't want the information after all.""Heh. That reminds me of a pair of jobs I once took. One was for information on a target, the other was to eliminate them. It was amusing handing the information packet over when the very last line was their time of death."Sharp patted my head, gently."That sounds like a you problem," Jenny said before crossing her arms. She uncrossed them right after because there was no room in the back for that kind of attitude."We... can set something up where you'll be compensated a small amount if there's any violence. Having a third gun, so to speak, would make things a lot safer for us," Alyssa said.Jenny worked her jaw, but she didn't seem entirely averse to the whole thing.In any case, we arrived at the spot where they'd parked their old beater and got out of the taxi before it charged us extra. "Right, I'm heading home," Jenny said. "I stink. You all stink. Fuck, why do we never take jobs in nice places that smell good? Alyssa, why do you never want us to rob a perfume factory?""You complain too much," Alyssa said before turning her attention onto Sharp and I. "We'll see the... two of you in two days. In the meantime, do you have a number? In case plans change and we need to contact you?""Sure. I have a burner phone," Sharp said."Don't trust us with your real number?" Jenny asked.Sharp blinked. "Uh... actually, I don't have a real number. Just lots of burner phones."Jenny snorted. "Yeah, you sound like every baby edgerunner ever right there."That last comment had Sharp's mood on a high until we made it back to the company bike, the silly girl. "Let's get home. I want in on that shower you mentioned. And the babies will be worried. Usually when I leave for such a long day, I give them extra treats so that they know I'll be back. We didn't do that."Sharp sighed as she got on the bike. "Did anyone ever tell you that you worry about your cats too much?""No one who went on to live, no," I replied."Uh... I take it back?""I bet you do."Getting back home was a little involved, but with nothing pressing us for time, we made it back eventually. Of course, there was traffic on the way out of Boston Two, but that was just par for the course."I was thinking," I said as we rode in an armoured bus."Oh?" Sharp asked. She ran her hands through my fur. The humidity in the storm drains hadn't been kind."We have a day and a bit before this gig resumes. It might not be enough time to level a skill on the threshold of five yet, but it might be enough for one of your weaker skills to level up.""Hmm," Sharp muttered. "I have Cool, Magic, and Reflex at pretty low levels. Zero, one and two, respectively."Cool was still at zero? I looked up to Sharp, who was wearing a dopey grin. Right, yes. "It might be possible to increase Reflex, at least. You have courier work tomorrow morning, but that doesn't mean we have to waste the afternoon. How about something like... badminton, or tennis?""The sports?""No, the salad dressing. Obviously the sports. They'll train your reflexes a little, and there are some centres in town. Just an hour or so after work tomorrow. We don't want to burn your muscles before a job."Walking up to a job, even an easy one, with sore muscles was a good way to jack up the difficulty without meaning to. A younger me had learned that one the painful way, and it was a lesson I'd rather impart vocally to Sharp rather than have her experience it for herself."I think I might like that. It sounds fun!"
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Chapter Fifty-Seven — Next Day
Chapter Fifty-Seven — Next Day Work the next day passed in a flash. We headed out to Boston Two, got to the courier's office, then took off and got to work.The day passed relatively quickly too. I rode in a side-car while Sharp worked on her Body stat by peddling the bike manually. We didn't push too hard, of course. If we were going on a gig the next day, we didn't need her to have sore muscles the entire time.By the time early evening rolled around Sharp was pretty tired, but the bus-ride back home was relatively quiet, and I watched out for her while she took a nap.When we got home, Sharp fed the cats, gave everyone the attention they deserved, and then crashed on the couch for an hour or so.Obviously, I didn't let her sleep the day away, even if she was tired from work. That'd be wasteful.She wasn't even twenty. She could burn that candle from both ends. When she hit forty or so, then yeah, she'd need that nap, but until then?"Yes yes, you're very tired," I said as sarcastically as I could. "Now drink your energy drink and let's get started."It was for her own good. Besides, if she slept too much it would throw off her sleep schedule later. It was far too easy for a self-employed person to lose track of when it was a reasonable time to sleep.We started with stretches, which I was unsurprisingly pretty good at. A younger body, combined with the natural flexibility of a cat, meant I could twist myself around in a knot.Sharp couldn't even do the splits, but we worked on it a little anyway, and it wasn't like I couldn't practice to be even more flexible. There were few situations where more flexibility wasn't desirable or useful, or at the very least rather neutral.Once that was done, we started training reflexes. I had an old device to train boxing with. It was a sort of heavy but soft ball on a tether with a device on the ground that made it bounce in unpredictable ways.Sharp tried punching it while avoiding the ball when it bounced back.It was very amusing to see her eat the ball in the face when she dodged too slowly.As for my own Reflex training, that came in the far cheaper option of some old cat toys. Did I feel rather silly, doing somersaults and kicking at a ball on a long spring with colourful feathers? Yes. Did I leave me breathing hard after a few minutes and feeling like I was far too clumsy for my own good? Also yes.It was all worth it, in the end.Reflex Has Levelled Up!Reflex 2 3"Level up!" I said cheerfully."Oh! Me too!" Sharp said. "Reflex three! That's... not a big milestone, but it's still nice!""It's a good thing. Every step in the right direction is a good one."Our progress had slowed down somewhat recently. Not that badly, but it was still somewhat noticeable. In the first few days when I was turned into a cat, I think I had at least one skill level every day, if not two. Now it was closer to one level up every other day.Nothing to scoff at. At this rate, in two or three months Sharp and I will have accumulated a half dozen more perks, and they were all exceptionally powerful.Which actually worried me a little.Sure, in the short term, for someone given this kind of system, the progression rate might be incredible if they were throwing themselves into trouble headlong. Heaps of growth in a short time, accelerated by danger and risk.But the problem with risk and danger was that it was like playing Russian roulette. That first click was a one in six, but the next one? And the one after? It wasn't long before death was all but guaranteed.So what happened to people with a similar system as what we had? I knew they existed. The world was filled with edgerunners and mages and people with exceptional talents that managed to break through the barrier of mediocrity imposed by corporatism.Given a year, how many perks could we unlock with minimal risk?Had there been others like Sharp who took the slow, careful route to incredible power until they had a strong base to jump off of?That evening, after Sharp and I showered and got ready for bed, after Sharp laid down and immediately konked out for the night, I found myself tip-tapping my paws on my tablet. Searching the web was a pain, and I was growing to hate autocomplete and the stupid, fiddly little correction thing that tried to fix my grammar but only made it worse.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!The first few searches weren't specific enough, and then the search engine started to run out of sponsored ads and products it could push onto me. Eventually, I started to run into some interesting results.I tapped a link, ears twitching as I scanned over the page. It was a forum post, some seven years old, but I wasn't going to let recency bias cloud my judgement. The information I was looking for didn't factor in time as much as some other things did.The information was compiled by a forum user that seemed to have an obsessive interest in people with systems like Sharp's. Their ramblings gave me the impression that this person might not be entirely... normal, in their perspective, but their obsession was paying dividends for me now, so I wasn't going to complain.Over the course of three years of meticulous research, they'd compiled information on seven individuals who may or may not have similar systems to what Sharp had. Two were difficult to confirm, with the only proof being a few statements they made. One was... a lot harder to verify than even that. They were an individual in western China that came out of nowhere, displayed several unique and bizarre abilities, and who were chased down by their government. They put up one hell of a fight, and over the course of a week, displayed more and more strange abilities before they eventually disappeared.If they were like Sharp, then that was chalking up one more on the 'burn fast and hard' tally.Of the others, there were two that might have still been alive. The nominal CEO of a military-tech company based out of the west coast, and a European woman in charge of a biotech corporation who was a doctor before she started to gain strange skills at an alarming rate.Well, alarming in the grand scheme of things. One or two strange abilities per year.Interestingly, if I assumed that that was based on perks gained then... well, it was very possible that she'd gained a lot more than that, but that several perks weren't so easily visible.If that was the case, then the real question wasn't just who had systems like Sharp's, but how many of them were out there, quietly accumulating power without drawing attention?I flicked my tail, deep in thought. The forum user, who went by the handle GhostCompiler, had tried to contact some of these individuals. Unsurprisingly, they hadn't responded. Either they were smart enough to keep their heads down, or they were too far removed from normal society to care about an internet rando trying to catalogue them.Still, there were patterns. The ones who burned bright, who made big moves and used their abilities publicly, rarely lasted more than a few weeks. The ones who made it past the one-year mark? They either disappeared into corporate or government structures or built their own protective empires.I glanced over at Sharp's silently snoring form. We'd made it past the week mark.Did that mean that we were destined to go the other way?My own ambitions had always been rather mundane. Sure, I had a lot of money... for a single individual. I could afford to live a very comfortable life. Good insurance, a paid-off home, money in case of disasters, a nice vacation every year and multiple pets.I was living a nice, cushy life.Sharp's perks and abilities could let her do the same.But would she want to stop there? Would I be able to keep up with her once she set her ambitions even higher?Sharp and I were growing stronger, yes, but we were still small-time. If we kept progressing at a steady rate, how long until we hit the point where we were noticed? And if we were noticed, would we be able to survive it?I wasn't naïve enough to think that corporations, governments, or even just other edgerunners wouldn't jump at the chance to get their hands on someone like Sharp. Or me, for that matter.There were more posts, mostly speculation, but a few mentioned other rumored system users. I took some notes, saving names, locations, anything that might be useful. We needed to be careful, but that didn't mean we couldn't be prepared.
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