Writing Prompt: Wrong Number (Patreon)

This is our last Writing Prompt update before we start regular Magpie Wizard posts. I hope you enjoy! 

I won't go into as much detail on this one. This is a story I'm going to come back to at some point, once I'm done with Magpie Wizard's second book out of the planned four. 

Original Prompt: You've always hit the same 4 numbers to get into your apartment building "4100" and the loud buzz would ring and you would enter, but tonight, drunk as hell, you accidentally enter "4110". Not a buzz, but a voice. "Please enter".

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Tim Chu didn’t normally drink so much. Of course, he didn’t normally get fired from his job either, so it wasn’t a normal day anyway. 

The aged taxi driver earned his tip as he politely listened to Tim’s ramblings. As a younger man, he’d have told Tim to shut up. You couldn’t be too careful, nowadays. The city was falling apart and you never knew what someone might be packing if you said the wrong thing. 

“… an… and let me tell you another thing! Good luck supporting that app without me! They said I was redun… redundant! Van Sciver doesn’t know shit about error codes, always asking me shit he should’ve learned the first week. If you got stock in United Technology Products, sell it! Fuck, short it!”

“We’re here,” said the driver. He’d had worse, but he hadn’t had many that were louder. 

Tim leaned forward, his breath strong enough to make the driver remember why he’d given up the sauce years ago. “Hey, thanks man. You did great. Smooth ride. Only… only threw up once.”

“You what?”

But, Tim was already out the door. The fifty he’d left behind would help mollify the driver’s anger, once he found it. 

Fortunately for Tim, he was trim, since he didn’t have much weight to balance as he walked unsteadily down the street. “I’ll bounce back,” he muttered as he made his way over to the intercom at the entrance of his apartment building. He leaned against the stainless steel device, focusing intently on the keypad beneath the small display screen. 

“C’mon, you do this every day, what’s the code?” Tim struggled to recall it. He knew it started with a four and had zeroes and ones in it. “4110? Yeah, that sounds right.” 

DENIED. 

“Don’t have to be so friggin’ rude,” he said as the device made an angry ding. Just how much had he had? He swore a light flashed from the screen and there had been a brief image of something like an eye. 

“Please enter,” said the artificial voice. 

“Huh? I didn’t put in the right code…” His addled mind didn’t have long to consider this mystery as the door strike buzzed. “Guess I’ll take a little good luck,” he said. 

If he’d been in his right mind, he might have noticed that the hallway was too dark. Even the last time they’d had a power outage, there had at least been a few emergency lights. He wasn’t, though, so he stepped right into the inky darkness. 

Light. Blinding light that made his head pound. When his poor eyes focused again, he very nearly wet himself. The mechanical monstrosity ahead of him made him think of a bowling ball. Where the finger holes would have been, there were open slots, revealing a camera, the blinding light and something that Tim really, really hoped wasn’t a gun. 

“Beginning secondary DNA scan,” the enormous ball declared. A red light on the camera module flashed at him. “Identity confirmed.” The hatches containing the unknown weapon and the light closed, while another revealed a telescoping arm ending in three claws. “Welcome to the Villain’s Vine, Dr. Malice.”

“Doctor what?”

To Be Continued!