Bad Beat - Chapter 13 - Unpacking (Patreon)

After that surprising revelation, Gabriel didn’t really know what to say, so he just changed the subject and continued to discuss the reaction of the Electric Jackals gang.

For now, both of them would do their best to attract as little attention as possible. Mia would stay at home and work, while Gabriel would go to work as usual.

With the elevated presence of the gang members in the building, she wanted to take no chances.

Gabriel agreed without any issues. He had no desire to meet with more gang members.

Getting shot at once was enough.

There was no desire to have a repeat of it.

“What about the loot?” Mia asked curiously.

It was clear it was killing her to know how Gabriel had done the heist, but she was reluctant to inquire further lest she break the uncertain truce between them.

Gabriel appreciated her restraint.

He kind of trusted her, but there were still several issues that kept nagging him.

For now, he would give her his trust, but make sure to prepare himself for the sudden, but inevitable betrayal, with the hope that all his paranoia would turn out to be for nothing.

“For now, let’s leave it where it is…” he said with a small smile.

“What if they find it?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Then they find it. There is nothing they could use to identify us on it,” he told her.

Mia eyed him, opening her mouth to ask more questions, but then she shook her head.

“Fine. Fine…” She looked frustrated. Gabriel didn’t know it was with herself, him, or the situation.

“Then, my last question is: what about the final pallet? What do you think is in it?”

Gabriel furrowed his brow. He had no idea and told her so.

“Could be anything. Maybe it’s drugs, or fake money…”

“Jackals don’t deal in drugs, though…”

“As far as the public knows…”

“I mean, yeah… but wouldn’t a drug operation be more protected?”

“Maybe they wanted to use the obscurity to their benefit? If nobody thinks you’re dealing in drugs, then nobody watches you for drug shipments?” he said thoughtfully.

Mia let out a sigh.

“That would mean all the information I collected over the months is less than useless…” She looked rather disappointed.

Gabriel wanted to reach over and console her, but he didn’t know how she would take it.

“I’m sure it’s not useless… you just have to–” he began, but Mia just shot him a look and interrupted him.

“No. I appreciate you saying that, Gabriel, but let’s be clear. I made an assumption, and now reality refuses to conform to those assumptions.” She sounded bitter at her own actions.

Gabriel wasn’t really great at comforting anybody, but he had learned that sometimes distracting them worked.

“Would it help if I got you a better laptop? And phone? And watch?” he asked hopefully in an upbeat tone.

Mia sent him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing, but didn’t voice it. Instead, she just let out a tired sigh, and a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll make sure they’re all the blackest black…”

“Appreciate it.”

**

Not wanting to chance any surveillance catching him in the act – or maybe electronic trackers revealing his location – he kept his deck hidden, not even using it in his apartment.

Instead, he spent the rest of the week recuperating.

He watched as his purple bruise slowly vanished – which he attributed to the Spiritual Rice he had been consuming – and otherwise just went to work, talked with Mia over a messenger app about the most mundane stuff, and let the world turn without his involvement.

On the internet, he watched as news of clashes between the Electric Jackals and several other gangs – like the Eagles or the Buzzers – picked up, as the blame for the attack on the Jackal warehouse was shifted to them.

Somebody had to be blamed after all…

The Eagles were a gang focused on properties and protection money, while also running several no-tell motels in San Bernardino.

The Buzzers, as the name suggested, were a gang that peddled party drugs. They owned most of the big party places in the area, and if you wanted to get the best and most sparkly high, then you went to them.

There weren’t many physical altercations between the gangs, but Gabriel saw several hastily taken, blurry photos of the gang members posturing at each other, and even the police presence had increased during the week.

It was probably just to show a flag, as Mia was very clear that most of the police were deep in one of the gangs’ pockets.

Superheroes were another story.

The rumors of a gang war developing – and boy, did it feel bad that his actions caused it – had drawn several of them to the area.

Every day, there were rumors of different supers patrolling the area, taking down robbers, muggers, and other criminals.

Suspiciously, none of them went after the gangbangers.

“Man… at least you could make it less obvious…” he complained as he watched the news on TV after a hearty dinner, as the spokesperson of the San Bernardino district office touted the numerous arrests made by the supers tasked by the city.

They talked about being tough on crime and taking back the streets from the scum infesting them, but not one word about the gangs.

Not that Gabriel expected any different.

He just hoped they would leave it with the C-tier heroes and wouldn’t call in the big guns.

He didn’t know what he would do if Bombshell or any of her peers showed up.

An A-tier super with information-gathering power could be dangerous to his continued existence.

­­**

By Saturday morning, he was so excited by the prospect of the loot that he almost forgot the customary trip to the bakery.

In this short time, he had grown to love the small shop, even tolerating the always chatty old lady – “Call me Martha, dear!” – for the pastries that captured his heart.

And of course, he made sure to share the bounty with Mia, who was rather reluctant to leave her apartment for anything but the direst of things.

Like grocery shopping.

And that was mostly it.

Even then, now that she had Gabriel as a friend, she asked him to shop for her on the way home from his job.

‘Man… and I thought I had issues…’ he mused as he started moving things out of the center of his living room to make space for the pallets.

Wiping the sweat off his forehead, he reached for the Deck of Infinity – which never seemed to be out of reach – and picked it from the table that was shoved next to the wall.

Trying to keep calm and thanking his lucky stars that the cards seemed to be immune to sweat, he began to fan them out.

First, he picked those that held items he didn’t need now – his updated bugout bag, his file about himself, and so on.

They were set aside.

Then the empty cards.

Finally, he was left with a handful of cards full of wonders.

Wonders he had stolen from a notorious gang, but still.

He quickly sent a prayer to the RNG gods to make sure he got something good and began to observe the cards.

They all had blue borders, except for the last one, which had a green one, while having the same name: 1 x Pallet of Goods.

The name said nothing about what the pallets contained, so Gabriel had to summon them one by one and see what he could find.

Naturally, he would leave the mysterious pallet to last.

Mostly because he suspected it had some kind of tracking device in it, and he wanted to use the other loot to potentially build something that would disable or jam it.

Carefully, he took the first card and held it in front of him while imagining the pallet appearing on the carpeted floor.

The pallet with the boxes on it materialized – thankfully – right where he imagined it.

He didn’t want the people to hear thuds as the pallets appeared in midair – or maybe even explain to his new landlord why there was a square hole in the floor.

Would have been a tad awkward…

With his trusty multi-tool, he began to free the boxes from their wrap prison, making sure that all debris went into a card and vanished into nothingness.

He would be generating enough trash to drown in it – best not to let them pile up.

The boxes, to his relief, contained nothing more than an assorted collection of off-brand laptops, piled high enough that several on the bottom were warped and damaged due to the weight on them.

With practiced ease, he began feeding the laptops into the cards two at a time.

Each fusion made the card shimmer faintly before an upgraded card landed in his hands.

After a few minutes of steady work, he had three Cutting-Edge Laptops sitting in front of him and a pile of empty boxes.

He made sure to fuse the chargers too, gaining three Cutting-Edge Laptop Chargers.

After making sure there was nothing in the boxes that would be of use, he destroyed the packaging material and took the pallet itself into an empty card.

Just for funsies, he wanted to fuse the pallets at the end to see what happens to them.

The next pallet stack contained phones from at least a dozen different manufacturers and brands.

Once again, quality was a mix of pristine devices and others so scratched and dented that he didn’t know how they ended up in there.

As they were all smartphones, he didn’t have to go through as many iterations just to get to Cutting-Edge Smartphones, but then he was left with hundreds of the things.

Sighing slightly, he took a seat on the couch and reached for the first two Cutting-Edge Smartphones, absorbed both of them with two cards, and began the fusing process.

The two cards slid together the moment he willed it.

Their green borders bled into one another before collapsing into a single card with the name: 1 x Next-Gen Smartphone.

A little underwhelming, but it made sense.

Next came the fusion of two of those.

Another green border, but Gabriel could feel that it was close to changing to another color: 1 x Prototype Smartphone.

From Prototype, it jumped to Experimental.

The phone that appeared looked sleeker, thinner, almost like something pulled from a near-future sci-fi film.

From there, it went to Breakthrough Smartphone with an orange border.

Now it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie set.

Finally, he had enough phones left to do one more fusion, resulting in two Frontier Technology Smartphones with orange borders.

Curious, he took out his own phone and fused it with the new one he had created.

The card flashed gently, and he found the same beaten-up phone in his hand after ejecting it from the card that was now called Urban Sentinel Device.

Unlocking the device, he saw it worked extremely smoothly, almost reacting before he even decided what he wanted to do.

The apps opened within milliseconds of tapping the icons, and the storage was almost ten times what it had been before.

Idly checking the settings menu, he saw that he had more computing power in this small phone than in most modern gaming PCs.

Happy with the change, he quickly put the other upgraded phone aside for Mia and placed the rest of the fusion remains into a box while destroying the packaging.

**

The next hour or two was spent going through the next few pallets, repeating the same upgrade process on a bunch of peripherals.

He ended up with some awesome smartwatches, tablets, power banks, wireless earphones, phone cases, screen protectors, and so much more.

Another pallet contained auxiliary devices for laptops and PC devices rather than smartphones.

Thanks to that, he managed to acquire several upgraded keyboards, webcams, and ring lights with a few odds and ends tacked on.

That was followed by unpacking the pallet filled with graphics cards.

He began feeding them into the deck in pairs.

Cards flickered. Hardware appeared.

With every iteration the cooling fins grew larger, the circuitry denser, until the final results looked less like consumer hardware and more like something salvaged from a supercomputer.

Happy with the results – six extremely powerful graphics cards – he placed them to the side, a plan starting to form in his head on how to use them.

Sadly, while crypto existed, all the supers with technology-related skills made sure it was invalidated as a currency – though the blockchain was still used for data verification and identification purposes.

A pity, but also a relief.

The market was volatile enough without crypto.

However, high-end graphics cards had many more uses…

The next pallet contained token home security devices – sensors, cameras, alarms, and the like – which he quickly fused into a blue-bordered card: 5 x Cutting-Edge Sensory Device.

Alone, they were probably worth very little, just giving their owner a little measure of peace of mind. But with his upgrades, they formed a powerful sensory device that could be used for many things. He hadn’t decided what to use it for, but for now, it would keep.

He put it next to the other things he had created and reached for the next card.

**

Gabriel leaned back on his couch and let the process take over, entering a sort of flow state.

Hard drives appeared, vanished into cards, and returned as better ones.

Motherboards followed.

Processors.

Power supplies.

One thing he hadn’t found in all of those was RAM packages.

But still, the number of things he had found was enough to build some very powerful computers.

It was late afternoon when he had finally finished with the entire haul, only leaving the mysterious pallet as the last one.

The entire room was filled with high-tech items, causing a smile to appear on his face.

‘Yeah… I could get used to this power.’ he mused as he began packing all of those things into boxes, which then went into cards.

If there was something dangerous in the last pallet, he wanted to be ready to evacuate without losing the things he had almost died for.

Finally, the living room was once again empty, with the space in the middle waiting for the pallet.

Before he got started, he pulled out his phone. He unlocked it and began scrolling through the options, certain he had seen something when he checked it previously.

Finally, after a minute of searching, he found it.

Signal Jamming

Per the sparse description, it would jam any radio signal within five to twenty feet, depending on how he set it up.

Turning it on, he placed it on the table and picked up the deck again.

Gabriel confirmed that he had his shoes – and pants – on, his keys were in the lock, and his valuables were packed away, before he carefully raised the last card and summoned the pallet into his apartment.

Stepping closer, he opened his multi-tool and began to cut away the wrapping.

A minute later, he opened the topmost box and let out a whistle.

“Well… that explains a lot…”