Bad Beat - Chapter 06 - Observation (Patreon)

Gabriel spent the next week moving in and buying a few used pieces of furniture to fill the empty spaces. He picked up more comfortable chairs for the kitchen, a few additional kitchen tools for when he cooked, and a thick, firm mattress topper to make his sleep better. When he saw the prices of the high-quality mattresses, he decided that he would stick with a mattress topper for comfort for now.

He also spent some time buying a bit more clothing, just to play up the situation.

After all, he had just lost his apartment. It would be strange if he didn’t buy more clothes. Plus, the ones the original Gabriel had were pretty much not his style.

Not that he really had a style, but he refused to go out in a shirt with a half-naked woman on it. Plain black and white shirts for him – thank you very much.

He also used his new laptop to set up a few of his own alerts for interesting things. Things like appearances by the big supers, warnings about villain attacks, Helix announcements, and a few more.

It was a bit boring tracking down all the APIs and RSS feeds and putting them together into a single, unified feed for himself, but between his own knowledge, whatever the original had retained from community college, a bit of internet sleuthing, not to mention his enhanced mental faculties, it went fairly quickly.

He also bought a few more bags of rice, as he couldn’t really go back to normal rice after eating the Ordinary Spiritual Rice.

His body simply craved it, even though it was starting to have less and less effect.

Another thing he started doing was theory-crafting his new power.

Technically, he could do what he did with the pills: buy cheap bulk items, fuse them with books, and then consume them. However, the issue with that was that he didn’t have the money to buy them in bulk. On top of that, buying those items in bulk would attract attention from the wrong kind of people.

After all, who would buy fake supplements and vitamin pills?

People who were planning to resell them at a markup as part of some kind of scheme!

No, thank you.

Instead, he tried something else.

He looked around on social networks and saw that the district had posted an announcement about trash collection and similar pickups. One of them was about used books, magazines, and other things made out of paper.

He walked by to look for a few engineering books, to see if his idea would pan out.

Thankfully, he wasn’t alone. There were already a bunch of people rummaging around in the giant pile of books. When he idly asked what they were looking for, they enthusiastically explained that they were hunting for first editions and signed books that they could sell.

A nice bunch of people.

When Gabriel told them he was looking for old engineering and programming books for his hobby, they immediately started calling out to him if they found something.

After two days of searching, he came home to his new apartment with sixty-four engineering books, ranging from university textbooks to books explaining how certain things worked for the layman.

However, when the final fusion was done, Gabriel was left disappointed.

The card’s border was white, with a very simple name: 1 x General Engineering Encyclopedia.

It was a beautiful book, containing all the knowledge from the books he had fused, with the formatting, grammar, wording, and calculations correct, and reorganized into a very easy-to-follow system. But most importantly, it contained no new knowledge.

Just the same old knowledge, now packaged in a gorgeously bound encyclopedia that still had the new-book smell.

With a sad smile on his face, Gabriel removed it from his card and put it on his shelves, where it joined a few cookbooks he had found during his search. Most of the recipes were familiar, but he spotted a few he had never seen before.

He wanted to do so many things, especially with technology, but one look at his pathetically anemic bank account made him decide against it.

For now, he just kept his eyes on dumpsters and trash piles, hoping to spot something as amazing as those laptops that were thrown out.

Sadly, the universe decided that he had already used up enough luck for the time being.

In turn, he ended up watching TV, where Bombshell was thanked by the city government for preventing Voidwake from destroying an industrial complex, with no mention of the three apartment buildings that were ruined in the fight.

He also watched a bunch of super fights on the internet, trying to see if he could glean something about them.

However, what he saw was that there were two types of supers.

The first group probably were people who came from similar or even worse situations than Gabriel. They fought with everything they got, often winning by a hair’s breadth, their armor or uniform in tatters. They never gave interviews, vanishing before the press could get to the scene.

Some had some kind of online presence – a blog, social network account, or website – but most of them only existed on unofficial wikis and databases.

The second group contained those whom Gabriel mentally categorized as corporate supers.

They had high-quality armor or clothing, perfectly whitened teeth, and almost no blemishes on their skin – at least on the parts that could be seen. And they were always ready to give an interview.

Still, the most damning fact was that almost every time, the press was already on the scene of the fight before it even started.

Super suspicious if you asked him…

Gabriel also looked into upcoming major events, but aside from a few sports events and concerts, there was nothing really exciting on the horizon for Los Angeles.

Hell, even the midterms were months away.

A few local district elections were happening, but nothing to write home about.

The development projects that would replace his old apartment building were still in the beginning phases, so even with the assistance of technology developed by super-smart people, it would take a while before those began for real.

His only issue during the week was Mia.

Every time he left his apartment, she was there.

Going for an early shift? She was there in running clothes, ready for some exercise. Admittedly, she looked damn fine in them, so he was not that upset to see her.

Going for a late shift? Mia was just closing her door, ready for a quick trip to the grocery store.

Several times, she even shopped at the Freshway where he worked.

A few times when he was entering the foyer of the building with his shopping bags, she was just coming down in the elevator.

And the entire time, she mostly just said hi a few times. Never stopped to chat. Or ask how he was...

Just silently staring at him as they walked past each other in the corridors, or stood silently, and very awkwardly, next to each other in the elevator, always with a strange look on her face.

Admittedly, Gabriel was never the best at reading people’s faces in either lifetime, but something in her eyes unsettled him.

The question was: what was she planning?

It turned out he didn’t really have to wonder for long.

On Saturday afternoon, as he was sitting in front of his laptop, the TV blaring in the background with some kind of quiz show, he was doing his usual relaxing activity of looking up superpowers when his bell rang.

RING RING

He stood up, made sure he was wearing decent clothes – shorts and a plain white T-shirt with no stains – and headed for the door.

For some reason, doors didn’t come with peepholes in this building. Gary had sent him a message asking if he wanted a camera hooked up, but the price made him hesitate.

Well, apparently, his laziness just came back to bite him in the ass.

Opening the door slightly, his eyes widened.

Mia stood there, dressed in black yoga pants, a red and black cardigan, and a graphic t-shirt, with enough mascara to paint a mouse fully black. There was the expected silver jewelry, including several oddly placed ear piercings and a watch on her wrist.

She was holding a plastic box in her hand and smiling.

Right at him.

“Hey, Gabriel!” she chirped with a smile. “I made some lemon shortbread, and I thought I would share it with a friend.”

Gabriel blinked.

‘Were they friends? Did it happen like that?’ He was so confused.

“Hey… Mia,” he answered hesitantly while opening the door wider. “Thanks, I suppose.”

“Mhmm,” she nodded excitedly. “I saw you buy a bunch of lemons, so I guessed what your favorite flavor is.”

‘How the heck do you reply to that?’ he wondered as he helplessly opened the door even wider, motioning the woman to enter.

“Do you… do you want to come in?”

“Can I?” she asked.

Before Gabriel could answer, she was already standing in the middle of his living room, staring at everything.

“Sure, come on in,” he muttered under his breath and closed the door before following her inside, nervousness twisting in his stomach.

First real interaction with another human being in this world. People at his work and Gary didn’t count.

“Cozy,” she stated as she looked back at him.

Then, as if remembering her purpose, she held out the box of shortbread with both arms. “Here!”

“Thanks!” he said, accepting it. “Let me get a plate for it,” he offered, instantly defaulting back to his learned good manners.

In the kitchen, he opened the box and took one of the slices and bit into it. Instantly, an explosion of lemon flavor filled his mouth.

“Sho good…” he mumbled around the food in his mouth.

Lemon was his second-favorite flavor.

Naturally, nothing beat raspberries. Even the universe tasted like raspberries.

‘That reminds me, I need to drop by the market to get some. I haven’t eaten them since I arrived here…’ he thought to himself.

He took a plate and put the rest of them on it before turning around to share them with his new ‘friend’.

Only to come face to face with a gun.

Well, calling it a ‘gun’ was a bit of a misnomer. It looked like some kind of technological Frankenstein’s monster, put together from a dozen different devices.

Not really the most important detail when it was pointed directly at him, but he still noticed. There were blue light strips going along the side, buzzing with energy.

Mia was staring at him with a pretty stern expression as she held the gun.

Gabriel looked down at the shortbread, then back at the gun. “If you wanted me to wait, you should have told me so!”

Apparently, it was the wrong thing to say, as her left eye twitched and her finger pulled the trigger.

There was a flash of blue – Chekhov blue, his mind noted it absently – before his world turned to darkness.

He came to consciousness an unknown amount of time later, sitting lamely on his own couch, blinking the confusion out of his eyes, his elbow oddly hurting.

Mia was sitting on one of his chairs in front of his laptop, furiously typing on the keyboard. He noticed his phone was also on the table. She didn’t look happy as she muttered to herself in front of the beat-up device.

“What the hell? Why does this… I don’t understand…”

He shook his head, trying to clear the last remnants of whatever had happened to him, and spoke up.

“Maybe you could try asking me?”

Mia flinched, and Gabriel was once again staring at the young woman’s weapon. Though this time, he saw clearly how her watch detached from her delicate wrist and transformed into a monster of a gun in a fraction of a second.

Instantly, his hands went up.

“Don’t shoot! I have a family!”

Mia snorted, her gun never wavering. “Good try, but I checked. You’re an only child with no relatives.”

“Err, I haven’t eaten all the shortbread yet? Which was delicious, by the way!” he tried again.

She didn’t buy it.

“Shut up,” she told him with another eye twitch. “I’m going to ask questions, and you’re going to answer them. Understood?”

Gabriel looked around, hoping to spot something that would help him, but nothing materialized that would magically help him extricate himself from the situation. He wondered if the deck would materialize again to save his life, but he didn’t have high hopes. After all, it didn’t save him from the first shot…

With a despondent sigh, he looked back at his attacker, who really shouldn’t be this attractive, and nodded.

“Understood.”

“Good,” she said with a slight smile. “Now, tell me…Gabriel…what did you do with those laptops?”

He blinked in surprise.

‘Laptops? Really?’

Apparently, even his lucky happenstance was bringing him bad luck.

“What laptops?” he replied with a confused look on his face. He hoped she would buy it.

“Don’t lie.” Apparently, she didn’t buy it. Mia’s hand tightened around the gun. “The laptops behind the Processware building. In the dumpster. Where I arranged them to be dumped,” she ranted at him. “What. Did. You. Do. With. Them?”

Gabriel eyed the young woman. That did not sound like a professional interrogation technique, although his only experience with them was seeing them in movies and reading about them.

Still, it helped him relax a little.

“I mean…how do you know I had anything to do with them?”

She just scoffed. “I had a camera pointed at them. You were the only one to walk over there before I went to pick them up.”

“Ahh…”

“Ah, indeed. So, spill. Where are the laptops?” she asked again, gun still trained on Gabriel.

Instead of answering, Gabriel took a little gamble.

“Why do you even need those destroyed laptops?” he asked curiously.

She sneered. “Because it took me a month to arrange for so many of them to be thrown out, and now I’m here without the laptops.”

Her eyes narrowed even further, and Sam could see her hands beginning to twitch.

“So, spill!”