Sleep Paralysis

It was a quiet night at the offices of Barghest Precision Machining. Workers left the office and surrounding buildings in ebbs and flows over the hour, thinking nothing of the thankless night-shift passing in the opposite direction to take over the responsbilities of maintaining the flow of cyberware in and out of Raleigh, their priorities set on minimizing their time in the wind and rain in their desperate bid for the comforts of home and the weekend.
On a neighbouring building, sheltered beneath an array of ill-maintained solar cells, a stranger observes the crowd.
Null Kit sipped on his soycaf, savouring the invigorating taste of sugar-substitutes and pharmecutical-grade stimulants that kept him alert and attentive as he sifted through the metahuman currents moving in and out of the office-building through light-amplifying eyes, scanning for a specific person amongst a sea of gloomy faces shuffling into the building.
It wasn't long before Null Kit's target caught his eye: A lean elf, pale-hued and dark haired, wearing an unflattering custodial jumpsuit. His features were unremarkable, even somewhat difficult to differentiate from the crowd around him, but the intense gaze in his eyes, couple with the unnatural grace in which he weaved through the shifting multitudes around him and towards the office's main entrance, immediately singled him out as one Vin Antares, also known as Nocte, Null Kit's partner-in-crime in this particular venture. Nocte passed through the security-gate without incident and dissapeared into the building, dissapearing from Null Kit's line-of-sight. Shortly afterwards, a device in Null Kit's pocket buzzed and vibrated, and a gold-accented chat window materialised in his vision:

//SECURE CHANNEL OPENED//

Vodka - : im in
Vodka - : currently in restroom
Brandy - : Any issue getting past security, herr Grunwald?
Vodka - : nope, didnt even get looked at
Brandy - : The longer things stay that way the better
Brandy - : Your RFIDs have been spoofed so you shouldn't have any issue with automated systems
Brandy - : So long as you keep your head down nobody should notice you're not Mr Grunwald
Brandy - : which bathroom are you in?
Vodka - : mens room, left of the lockers
Brandy - : Did you find your stuff in 'your' locker?
Vodka - : yes
Vodka - : a revolver though?
Brandy - : Best I could snag on short notice. It takes silencers, and if this goes to plan you shouldn't need it or the mask.
Brandy - : CC-holster's fitted for your jumpsuit, tuck it in and pocket the other stuff.
Brandy - : The small yellow thing is something I coded up in my spare time
Brandy - : Plug it in to the terminal still we talked about and I'll be able to hook into the network
Brandy - : The chunky grey card is a maglock passkey, just use it like a regular security card and it'll open most doors on the ground floor
Brandy - : Higher security floors will need authorisation but I'll cover you on that
Brandy - : There's an earpiece and some specs too, stick 'em on ASAP, trust me
Vodka - : No lockpicks?
Brandy - : No keylocks in the building, omae
Brandy - : But no magical security, and the only drones are in the manufacturing buildings
Brandy - : Rent-a-cops have some decent chrome though, so don't get complacent
Brandy - : Terminal's in the first-floor call-office. Shouldn't be anyone in at this time
Brandy - : Plug me in and I can enter the host, then I'll lead you to the secure network
Vodka - : Anything else?
Brandy - : Have fun and be yourself.
Vodka - : :/

//SECURE CHANNEL CLOSED//

With the pre-run legwork finally underway, Null Kit turned away from the offices and sat himself down against the concrete wall he had spent the better part of an hour leaning on. Going over a multitude of steps and contingencies in his fast-paced stream of thought, he fished out a frayed cable from one of his pockets and, with a tuneless hum, he slotted one end of the cable into the bulky port implanted onto the nape of his neck, and the other into the cyberdeck sitting snugly in the duffel-bag set down next to him. Once the connection was established, Null Kit closed his eyes and inhaled...

//AUTHORISATION KEY ACCEPTED.//
//COMMENCING VR DIVE//

Electricity coursed through his nervous-system as he fell away from the world. The staccato tumbling of rain around him gave way to a quiet static hiss, and the weight of reality was torn off of his body, replaced with the indescribable sensation of immaterial power and substance coursing through every fibre of his being.
Null Kit opened his eyes, and found himself somewhere different, and as something different: He was adrift, floating weightlessly through the raw information of the matrix, filtered and processed into sensations that could be interpreted by the senses his brain was built to understand. His body was gone, replaced with a lean avatar of black geometric shapes topped with a feline skull, whose movements were tied not to the slow and and frail impulses of muscle and nerves, but to raw thought augmented by a lovingly customised cyberdeck. Null Kit took a moment to bathe in the crimson light of Raleigh's local-grid, choked as it was through the fog and nigh-impenetrable walls of advertising, before returning to the matter at hand.
The host-network for this particular office building was modest, a small building constructed from organic shapes in the iconic surgical teals and whites of its product-line. An unimpressive sight, but Null Kit knew from prior attempts at probing the host that such looks were deceiving, and so he was content to prowl outside in silent-running, waiting for Nocte to work his magic...

//SECURE CHANNEL OPENED//

Vodka - : found the right terminal, took a while because there was a camera in the room
Vodka - : it was logged on but when i plugged you in the display turned off?
Brandy - : Perfect.
Brandy - : Stay where you are if you can, I'm patching through.

//SECURE CHANNEL CLOSED//

Null Kit drifted towards the Host, the tips of his avatar's feet gliding across the surface of the rendered paths throughout the grid with the practiced grace of an ice-skater. With a flick of his wrist, all extraneous windows and applications were pushed out of his view, replaced with several windows of spartan user-interfaces, containing a multitude of finely tuned and hand-coded cracking programs with the Barghest office-host in its sights. Programs loaded, Null Kit raised his hands and clasped them together, prompting a final window to emerge between his arms...

//REQUEST TO DISENGAGE SIMSENSE FILTERS HAS BEEN RECIEVED//

//CAUTION: DISENGAGING FILTERS CAN LEAD TO INJURY AND/OR DEATH. CONTINUE?//

ENTER ADMIN-AUTHORISATION CODE: *********************************

...
...

//AUTHORISATION KEY ACCEPTED, HOT-SIM PROTOCOLS ENGAGED.//

Null Kit's avatar began to shudder to uncanny and inhuman tempos, his arms in particular twitching and writhing as if shaking apart at the atomic level. Flecks of golden light materialised around his chest and converged inwards in an ostentatious display as a multitude of safeguards and governors were disengaged, exposing Null Kit's wetware to floods of information and sensory-data that would leave less experienced minds paralysed in sensory-overload, but gave seasoned deckers like Null Kit that narrow edge that let them subvert the laws and foundations of the matrix with impunity. His hands unclasped and parted from each other, leaving a ghostly second pair of arms that soon followed, and a familiar blazing heat erupted from the core of his avatar, that comforting sensation of being intertwined with the matrix in ways other people simply couldn't comprehend, much less appreciate.
Having shed all pretences of lawful matrix-use, Null Kit turned his attention back to his prey. One of four hands reached forward and probed the thin outer-shell of the host, barely-perceivable motes of glimmering gold passing to and fro as he analysed the network's entry protocols. The device planted into the building's terminals by Nocte was doing its work, and the hand-coded agent in it was subtly interfacing with Null Kit's own persona, spoofing the network's security networks into believing that he was accessing the host via the building's own terminal with a seemingly legitimate access-mark; a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but far from inconsequential, and well worth the added noise of starting his infiltration through an internal proxy.
Null Kit cleared his thoughts and pushed through the host's entrance, entering without incident or notice. The Oak City grid's red haze was swallowed by darkness, taking the grid's architecture with it and in its place the inner-geometry of the host began to assemble itself: It was a plain system in terms of design, consisting of an art-neuvo styled office-building that mostly matched the floor-space of the office building itself, lit in teal lighting with icons for devices matching the approximate location of their meatspace counterparts - useful for authorised users to learn the system, but an armature design flaw in the eyes of unauthorised users looking to carve a safe path through the building's security.
Now inside the proverbial dragon's den, Null Kit moved forward slowly, and with due diligent to the ever-watchful eyes of the building's security-spider and IC programs - the latter being tastefully sculpted to resemble sniffing bloodhounds, skulking through the corridors. His presence was unnoticed by the host's guardians merely through a combination of tailored silent-running algorithms, constantly shifting proxy-nodes and the hope that whatever active personnel is monitoring the host continues to think there is nothing suspicious enough to warrant active searching. Null Kit studied and analysed the flowing data with a trained eye, silently pinging devices and observing the search-routines of the host's automated defences, until he converged onto his primary target.
The building's sole metahuman matrix-presence at the moment appeared to be pulling triple-duty in his nest of icons and linked devices: Infront of their nondescript salaryman avatar, a cluster of windows were connected to the outputs of a multitude of security-devices scattered in and around the building, their contents privy to those not gifted with Null Kit's talent in data-snooping. Surrounding the windows were various IT and messaging windows, displaying various outstanding report-tickets, as well as a single data-stream feeding some sort of textile craft-show for the spider's unapproved mid-shift entertainment. Easy prey, Null Kit thought to himself, prowling from the allegorical corners of the host.
With practiced ease and a moment to watch the Spider's craft-show, Null Kit transmitted the first injection of malign code towards the Spider's avatar. Slowly, delicately, Null Kit extended a clawed finger and raked it across the back of the spider's avatar, leaving behind a faint golden scratch proclaiming Null Kit's subversion of the Spider's very own hardware, as he continued to flitter between his displays, negligently oblivious to the intruder lurking where he can't see...
Another injection of code, another mark, but this one sparked a different reaction. The spider slowed, pausing their show with a gesture. Null Kit had succesfully marked the spider once more, but this time his actions didn't go unnoticed.
The Spider lifted a gloved hand to cautiously raise his defences, but it was too late: Null Kit lunged at the Spider, dissolving into a snarling cloud of detached shapes and closing the distance in an instant. All four arms buried themselves into their avatar with pulsing claws, an overwhelming spike of destructive code and biofeedback signals shunted into the spider's cyberdeck and mind. The confrontation started and finished in a single strike: The Spider's avatar froze, as if paralysed, and offered no resistance as Null Kit effortlessly finished establishing his control over what remained of his cyberdeck. The cyberdeck had barely managed to withstand the ferocious ambush but the Spider was less lucky, brought down by the overwhelming biofeedback Null Kit had shot through their nervous-system and left unconscious. But creative use of spoofed command-signals and link-locking through the spider's deck had enabled Null Kit to prevent the automated systems from catching on, keeping the spider online as a harmless facsimile of an attentive Spider.
With the primary matrix threat disabled, Null Kit turned back to the bigger picture. In spite of the sudden brutality, the host seemed to have taken no notice of it all, with patrolling IC continuing their standardised search-patterns none the wiser. Null Kit turned his attention to the remaining icons and devices once under the Spider's supervision, and with confidence bordering on arrogance began to quietly infest other icons and devices in the host with his insurgent code, starting with the security-camera feeds whilst he opened a secure communication-channel to Nocte...
"Am I coming in clear? Give me a wave if you hear me." crackled an uncanny, synthesized voice into Nocte's inner-ear. Nocte picked himself up from his hiding-spot amidst the rows of unattended desks, and glowered at the camera he had spent an unfashionable number of seconds avoiding prior, before reluctantly raising his hand in a half-hearted wave.
"Groovy." The voice spoke again, and continue unfettered at Nocte's nonverbal judgment of the antiquated coloquialism. "Had to put the Spider to sleep, but he's alone in his room. Ice might catch me if I'm not careful, but I've basically got the local system all to myself untill the night shift starts logging in, so let's get this done quick. First though..."
Nocte raised his eyebrows in novel curosity as the unfortunately garish pair of spectacles perched on his nose began to light up with colorful displays, projecting a readable interface with which Null Kit could better direct him through visual means. Nocte took a moment to tilt his head and purse his lips in an expression of begrudging approval, before zipping up his jumpsuit and making his way out of the room whilst Null Kit continued to quietly spoof and dismantle the rest of the building's electronic security measures, device by device, all beneath the notice of the patrolling IC.
"Alright, let's get going: take a hard left out the office and head down the corridor. Big set of transparent doors will take you through admin to the stairs, we'll get to R&D from there." Null Kit ordered, displaying the relevant directions onto Nocte's AR-augmented eyeware. Nocte took off in the confident stride of one who has every right to be where they are, eyes scanning for whatever Null Kit can't see through his cameras and throwing a casual wave at any that greeted him on his way.
As he approached the first locked door Nocte pulled out the passkey he was provided with, keeping its conspicuous appearance deftly hidden from the eyes of anyone around him, and slotted it into the door's maglock. There was a brief pause, followed by a melodic chirp and the mechanical clunk of the door's maglocks disengaging. Without missing a beat, Nocte slipped on through and into the main office-area of the building, whilst Null Kit exhaled in relief at the proper function of his device.
The faux-wood furniture and honky-tonk music piped through omnipresent speakers did little to shield Nocte from the mute, alien misery of office-life permeating throughout Barghest's main offices like a thick haze. Workers brushed past Nocte with the only acknowledgment of his existence being to reflexively avoid bumping directly into him, being either too tired from finishing their day-shift or too occupied with starting their night-shift to offer anything more. Office-drones leisurely wheeled by, stopping briefly on their predetermined routes to dispense soycaf or clean spills wherever they were needed. Clusters of cameras and other sensory-devices silently watched Nocte and his alleged coworkers from the ceiling, but Nocte paid them little mind, having trust in Null Kit's continued sabotage of the building's electronics as he continued to follow Null Kit's projected directions towards the main staircase.
A lone corpsec stood guard at the door leading to the stairway and elevators with his hands crossed behind his back, who gestured in greeting at Nocte as he approached. Null Kit peered from his continued underminding of whatever devices might impede Nocte's route and squinted at the feeds: Try as he might he simply couldn't make out what Nocte and the guard were conversing through the din of the office-workers and the questionable quality of the camera's built-in microphone, save that Nocte's tone was uncharacteristically chummy, but whatever small-talk was exchanged was sufficient for the guard to wave Nocte through without incident, in spite of his piercing, unblinking gaze remaining throughout the conversation.
"Security's gonna be tighter on the second floor, your uniform might not cut it if you run into anyone. Pinging the location of the patrols right now, I'll let you know when you can move." Said Null Kit, swiping between camera-inputs and ensuring that he remains undiscovered by the host's automated systems. Nocte flashed a nonchalant thumbs-up to the camera as he passed by. Orbs of light flickered to life on his glasses, marking the approximate location of the office's sluggish patrols in the "secure" floor of the building, and Nocte's posture slipped from a casual minimum-wage slouch into a low, primal stance that was far better suited for sneaking than blending in.
"There's a Troll on the other side of the door. I'll get his attention, and you can swoop down the corridor, straight to the archives." Crackled the synthetic voice. Nocte prowled around the door impatiently, periodically looking over his shoulder for unforeseen elements, waiting for...
"ARE YOU TRIPPING OVER UNFOLDED CLOTHES? TRY SHORTSTACK BY SPINGLOBAL, THE EASY-TO-USE, EASY-TO-STORE BUDDY THAT IRONS, FOLDS AND STORES YOUR CLOTHES NEATER THAN EVER BEFORE!"

The kitschy, joyful voice of an advertising shill blared from a nearby trid-display, projecting laundry-drone demonstrations in place of the usual schedules and memos. The portly Troll at the door jumped, backing into the door hard enough to rattle it loudly whilst clutching his chest, before letting out a sullen, frustrated snort.
"Ah, Dammit Monty!" The Troll complained, straightening himself up and staring dead into the camera. "That's the third time this month, you can't keep doing that, man!" He ploidded off dejectedly towards the trid-projector, huffing and puffing, giving Nocte ample opportunity to slide open the door and skulk through into the maze of secure corridors with catlike tread.
"Keep moving. First left down the corridor, third door on your right. Almost there..." Null Kit said, watching the cluster of camera-feeds in the corner of his vision as he deftly fluttered from security device to security device, barely keeping up with the his pace of sneaking as he corrupted appropriate camera-footage and spoofed various scanner and sensor devices into diagnostic-standby to make his approach a clean and unnoticeable one.
Nocte prowled through the corridors, eyes peering through windows and taking note of which rooms appeared empty and occupied. Just as he was about to reach the next intersection, the AR displays in his glasses erupted in a flood of red-hued icons, plastering the end of the corridor with large 'STOP' emblazoned signs.
"Hold it!" Null Kit hissed. "Patrol heard the noise from the trid, they're breaking and heading your way!"
Nocte snorted in frustration, and bolted to the nearest door, jiggling the handle in fruitless realisation that it was locked before looking up at the camera in indignant objection.
"The card, use your passkey!" Null Kit hissed, pushing his windows aside and rushing through the host as he searched for the right icon and appropriate commands. Nocte pressed himself up against the door, as if hoping to simply phase through it, pulled out the bulky card-shaped device from his jumpsuit. He slid the card into the appropriate crevice above the handle, only to be met with silence and a red light. Again, he pulled out and shoved the card back in, silently cursing and glaring at the nearest camera. Another red light. One more attempt, as Nocte considered how he might possibly ambush the guards and score an easy first kill in the confusio--

//PROVISIONAL ACCESS GRANTED TO: DOS-CF1//




//WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY SECURITY?//

There was a click from behind him.
On instinct, Nocte tested the door handle and nearly fell backwards into the empty conference-room as the door opened without resistance. Scrambling to his feet, he grabbed the inner handle with both hands and as gently as possible, pushed it back shut before the guards could see it. His chest froze mid-inhalation, leaving the interior of the room in silence as footsteps wordlessly plodded around the corner. Null Kit froze, watching from within the host, seconds ticking by at an unbearably sluggish pace from the point of view of his artificially-accelerated synapses. Nocte reached into his jacket, hands clasped around the grip of his revolver...
The guards walked on by, oblivious.
Nocte did not exhale, but lowered his head in relief, muttering a prayer of thanks to someone or something that Null Kit couldn't make out through the tinny quality of the securiy camera's microphone.
"They've past. You can get going if you're quiet." Null Kit muttered, sounding as tense as one can through a completely digitised voice as he waved a cluster of windows back into his view. "We're cutting it close, both of us. Get to the secure network room and we'll jet out of here."
Wasting no time, Nocte carefully opened the door and peered through. Seeing the backs of the guards disappear down towards the stairwell, he slunk out of the conference-room and slid around the corner into the final corridor. Even without Null Kit's AR-assistance, the door to the secure servers was unmistakeable, built around a reinforced frame made from reinforced alloys in lieu of the cheap wood-facade of the rest of the building's doors.
"Use the passkey again, I'll spoof approval from the spider. It'll work this time..." Null Kit said, watching Nocte distrustfully slot the passkey into the door. There was an audible bleep, and a single yellow LED lit up above the door handle.
...
A second light.
...
Then a third.
...

//PROVISIONAL ACCESS GRANTED TO: SSS-D01//




//WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY SECURITY?//

Null Kit's avatar smirked, as much as something with a jawless cat-skull for a head could, as he watched Nocte slip into the secure network room without incident. His prior caution around the building's security and matrix defences vanished, replaced with measured arrogance, as he considered himself effectively in control of a host that increasingly felt like a paper-tiger with the lack of complications he had in temporarily disarming it, and no small amount of suspicion...
The interior of the secure network room was a maze of wires, server-blades and monitors whose spartan gunmetal grey casings stood in stark contrast to the facade of modernity plastered on the hardware outside. The corners of the room held nests of security-devices, now defunct from Null Kit's reign of terror inside the Barghest host, and in the middle of the nest of electronics, a stout Dwarf woman lie unresponsive on an oversized ergonomic chair, her right hand propped over a cyberdeck whose innards audibly struggled against Null Kit's matrix-assault.
"She'll live..." Null Kit assured in an unconcerned tone. "So long as the system doesn't pick up that she's down for the count, we'll be fine. Now focus, we're looking for a storage unit containing some of these..." A digital image assembled itself polygon by polygon on Nocte's glasses, until he found himself looking at some sort of small plastic oblong with a number of ports on one side. Nocte paced around the room, looking for something that could hold such a device, and it wasn't long until he had homed in on a trio of reinforced metal lockers buried into one of the walls, each baring a listing of alphanumeric destinations which Nocte gestured to, along with one more slot for Nocte's passkey.
"Clever of Barghest to just keep some of their important stuff off the matrix entirely. Alright, we're looking for... Fourteen-Nine-A-Eighty-Five-Twelve." Null Kit rattled off, fruitlessly pressing his eyes against the security feed to search for it himself, but to no avail. Nocte however, was quick in deciphering in the locker's designation systems, and slotted his card into the locker...

//PROVISIONAL ACCESS GRANTED TO: SSD-14-9-A//




//WOULD YOU LIKE TO NOTIFY SECURITY?//

Null Kit casually declined the host's offer to let security know there was a break-in, and watched impatiently as Nocte opened the locker and pulled out a tiny portable storage-device, barely larger than his own cyberdeck.
"Score! Now plug it into the spider's deck. Once I've copied the files, we can get the hell out of here." Null Kit said triumphantly, shivering in anticipation at the treasure-trove of paydata. Nocte turned back to the peacefully-sleeping Dwarf and approached the damaged cyberdeck, pulling out a length of universal-connector cable from the storage device. The deck's casing was slightly warped, symptomatic of the havoc Null Kit had caused to its hardware causing catastrophic failure of its cooling-systems and peripheries. Only four universal-connector ports were present on the outside, and whilst three of them was already occupied the other was visibly arcing between its inner and outer components,
"The only free port's busted..." Quietly rasped a harsh voice into the room's cameras, gesturing to the poor condition of the Spider's deck.
"Ah, drek." Cursed Null Kit, fixated on the camera-feeds outside the room. "Well we can't just take it, damn thing's gonna be crawling with trackers. We'll have to unplug one of the others and hope for the best, and hurry; we're already cutting this closer than I'd like."
"if this goes south, i did what you told me to do..." Nocte quietly replied, and after a momoment of fruitlessly attempting to follow which cable snaked where in the tangled heap below the chair, yanked on the cheapest looking one connected to the cyberdeck.
Null Kit braced for the unfortunate inevitability, ignoring the creeping dread of the impulsiveness of his decision crawling up his spine: Within the host, the frozen metahuman avatar of the spider shook and flickered out of existence along with the garish teal lighting of the host, shortly replaced with an ominous red glow and a barely-audible but overwhelmingly menacing humming. The ceilings faded, and in their place an unblinking cluster of eyes large enough to obscure the unrendered exterior stared down, now coldly analyzing the entire host for unauthorised users. One of Null Kit's background programs chirped in with a projected warning of an automated security-alert springing to life in response to the disconnection of the Spider from her cyberdeck, and with it the host launching more dangerous search-algorithms and IC programs.
"Yep, yep, we've been rumbled!" the voice in Nocte's earpiece urgently informed, as small tones of alarm began to sound from within the server-room. "Just plug the unit in and get out, security's gonna be on its way."
Nocte reached into his jumpsuit and pulled out his mask - a featureless white affair, padded with ballistic ceramics and replete with the same AR features as the glasses he was stuffing back into his pocket - and slipped it over his face, before drawing his slim revolver and making his way out of the server-room, past the Dwarf who was now visibly convulsing from having been improperly dumped out of the matrix.
Null Kit gave his full attention to the Spider's cyberdeck, still for all intents and purposes under his control in spite of being disconnected from its dumpshocked user. With the prospects of stealth dissapearing over the horizon, he wasted no time in shunting through the storage-device's security and encryption algorithms with as much unsophisticated force as his own cyberdeck can muster, brushing aside the various warning-icons he was being given of the host's cryptid-shaped IC programs discovering and tracking his illicit connections to the host's devices. Only a scant amount of time ticked over in realspace as Null Kit cracked the device's security, copying as much valuable data as he can whilst deleting one or two unrelated files to cover his tracks, but within the host, every millisecond lurched begrudgingly past as the host's monstrous defendants began closing in on its intruder.
Two gunshots sounded out from the camera feeds.
Null Kit snapped back to his monitoring windows, having finished his data-extraction and replaced his repertoire of hacking programs with a set more suited for the short but violent carnage that was emerging. The secure network room was empty, save for the spider, as was the corridor outside, but a bloodstain on the wall gave him an idea as to where next to look. Flicking to the next camera, Null Kit found... still no Nocte, just another bloodstain and a guard slumped against the wall, wearily clutching a bloodied face. Flustered, Null Kit flicked through more cameras, each catching only a brief glimpse of his coconspirator and the ode to hand-to-hand brutality in the medium of gruesomely injured security personnel left in his wake alongside the sound of multiple gunshots and screaming sounding through the tinny microphones.
"Null!" spat Nocte from the other end of Null Kit's secure comm-channel. "Fourteen shots? Reallycouldn't have given me more than seven shots withi this popgun?"
"What, did you expect me to smuggle a bandoleer in?" Null Kit hissed back. Before he could further argue, his avatar shook and crackled in shock as an excruciating surge of hostile code and biofeedback was shunted into him. An IC entity - appropriately rendered to resemble the company's namesake monster - was looming over the once-hidden Decker, baring teeth of countermeasure-software capable of directly attacking Null Kit's synapses. Instinctively, Null Kit retaliated with a frenzied swipe of destructive data, failing to crash the program but assailing it with damage-control subroutines sufficiently to allow Null Kit with precious space to begin finishing his business within the host, knowing that he was far less formidable a matrix combatant without the edge of stealth and surprise on his side.
"Nocte, I'm bugging out, this host's getting too hot. Where are you?" Null Kit whispered back through his communication-channel.
"Outside." Replied Nocte, his mask's mic briefly picking up the cacophony of retaliatory gunfire.
"Great, thanks for specifying. I'll meet you OUTSIDE then!" Null Kit sniped back, closing the camera feeds so as not to divide his attention between the now-useless devices and the assailing host.
With little reason to stay about and with far more menacing looking IC programs being loaded into the host he braced himself to finally call it a day and retreat. The grey-IC charged forward, seeing to clamp down on Null Kit's avatar with a virtual mouth full of sharp allegories for aggressive cybersecurity software, but Null Kit was faster on the draw: His avatar flickered, blinking out of sight and instantly reappearing elsewhere within the host. This continued a multitude of times as Null Kit spoofed flung himself between proxy-connections linked through the host. None of the host's IC could not keep up, their tracing-routines failing to fully lock onto Null Kit's persona before he did the same and, with one final effort of self-preservation and burning spite, plunged his claws into the IC, fatally compromising its root-code and crashing it.
Null Kit's moment of triumph was short-lived, as he knew it would simply be a matter of time before the IC was rebooted, but without that particular instance keeping him link-locked, he had bought himself enough breathing room to exit on his own terms. With a brush of his four arms, Null Kit's avatar effortlessly disconnected the strands of code that highlighted him as a priority-target to the host and, with a twinge of regret at how much his impulsive decision was costing him and Nocte, vanished and left the host completely, retreating back into the Oak City Grid.

//CONNECTION TO PRIMARY GRID REESTABLISHED//

//RUNNING EYEINTHESKY.PRG//

...

...

...
//EST OVERWATCH CONVERGENCE SCALE: 31.121//

...

//SHUTDOWN KEY ACCEPTED, IT IS NOW SAFE TO DISCONNECT FROM VR//

Null Kit exhaled.
An uncomfortable weight tugged down on every part of his body as he re-accustomed himself to reality. Null Kit struggled to rouse himself into movement, and he was flooded with a feeling of uncomfortable dread and powerlessness akin to sleep-paralysis. A prosthetic hand reached up, unfettered by the drowsiness of its attached flesh, to wipe his eyes and dragged itself down his face, smearing a crimson trail down from his bleeding nostrils to his chin. A brief check of his internal biomonitor showed him the effects of biofeedback on his unresponsive body - painful, but nothing rest and adrenaline couldn't push him out of - before picking himself up, ears tuning in through the rain to the sound of a blaring alarm and, if he strained his ears, the unmistakable pops of gunfire in the distance.
Null Kit reached down to the duffel-bag that sat by him and hoisted it up onto the ledge infront of him and unzipped it. From within the grey canvas bag, he plucked out a mask of his own - a bulky black affair, replete with built-in environmental filters and mesh-filtered eyeholes for his implanted vision-enhancements to work unimpeded - along with an armored tactical jacket, a popper of Jazz and a much less subtle piece of tech than what he had provided Nocte: A customised FN HAR assault-rifle. Taking a deep inhalation of police-issue stimulants and wrestling his jacket on as fast as he could, Null Kit shouldered the duffel-bag and began his ascent down the building's fire-escape, rifle in hand.
Finding Nocte may be difficult, Null Kit mulled to himself: Having been spooked by the local cops, he's almost certainly turned his commlink off - a theory proven by Null Kit making a rushed but ultimately fruitless search for its signal with his own deck, now that it had finished rebooting in full - and he would have to locate him and secure an exit-route before Dragoon HTR showed up to put an end to things. Null Kit skulked across the road from his hiding-spot and nimbly climbed over the perimeter fence into Barghest's properties, praying that his sabotage of the building's exterior-cameras wasn't already being remedied by an off-site spider.
Null Kit's eyes homed in on a pair of security-staff, hastily donned in ballistic vests and each holding a carbine as they chased after the sound of gunfire in the distance. For lack of better leads, Null Kit tailed the two guards from a distance, lurking from cover to cover and occasionally looking over his shoulder as the two armed personell obliviously led him to his coconspirator, whose violent reaction to the run going off-rails was becoming more and more apparent to Null Kit's ears as they closed in further.
Null Kit's silent tailing of the two guards proved the correct decision, as they passed by multiple manufacturing-facilities and through a small parking-lot until they made their way to a warehouse - a staging area for holding finished products and components until Kurabokko personnel arrived to transport the goods to appropriate storage and distribution outlets - where outside the open door lay a single corpse, still wearing its security uniform but otherwise mutilated beyong recognition, next to his rifle and the shot-out remains of a security roto-drone. The guards slowed down their approach, eyes locked at the ghastly display in disgust and horror.
"Casualty, no pulse on his monitor..." Said first guard, a stout Ork, attempting to mask his disgust beneath professionalism as he moved towards the adjacent door.
"Stack up on the door, it's fucking on now!" shouted his partner, a muscular human female, aggressively racking hte bolt back on her rifle as she confidently approached the open doorway.
A rattle of suppressed gunfire erupted from the shadows between two parked vans, courtesy of a hidden Null Kit. Two shots struck the Ork, planting their electrified payload directly onto the side of his neck and head, sending him convulsing and stumbling over the drone wreckage and down to the floor. His human friend twisted around and fired a frenzied burst into where she suspected the shots came from, but was informed of her failure by way of a second burst of three rounds flying back in her direction. Two shots scored direct hits onto her armored vest and the third embedded itself into the wall next to her head, only succeeding in stunning her on the impact but making her easy pickings for a second burst to hit home, knocking her to the ground and leaving her the same convulsing mess as the Ork. Null Kit emerged from the shadows, sights trained on the floored guards and gingerly walking towards the warehouse doorway, taking due care to look over his shoulders and ensure his entrance was unseen and unimpeded.
"Wait, fuckin'..." The Ork guard croaked, barely aware of the world as he raised his arms in submission. Without hesitation, Null Kit's cyberarm lunged down and clamped its hand onto the Ork's face with inhuman speed and force. In a flash, the Ork was rendered insensate by tens of thousands of volts running through the electroshock-contacts embedded in Null Kit's hand. Taking no time to admire the utility of his prosthesis in spite of his desire to do so, Null Kit simply released his fingers, letting the Ork fall limply out of his hand, and stood back up to enter the warehouse.
The interior was deathly quiet relative to the chaos outside, the rain fading out to an uncomfortable silence punctuated only by the buzzing of a nearby terminals, the dripping of water falling off of Null Kit's clothes and the quiet but unmistakable sounds of violence further in. Closing the door behind him with his back foot, Null Kit prowled forward through the tiny makeshift office-room, crouching to hide his figure behind desk cubicles either side of him as he made his way towards the entrance of the main warehouse floor, where the darkness within was interrupted only by the brief glimpse of flashlights in the distance.
A chair rattled in the far end of the room. Null Kit swung his rifle around to bare at the location of the noise, a projected crosshair in his cybereyes drawing onto to a seemingly unoccupied desk. As he approached, the terrified expression of a young dwarf woman in a stained jumpsuit emerged from the tiny hiding-spot. Null Kit kept his gun affixed to her face for a moment longer, finger on the trigger, but upon seeing that the woman was simply an unfortunate bystander, settled with gesturing the women back beneath the desk, turning his weapon back towards the end of the room after she wordlessly complied and disappeared out of view.
Creeping into the warehouse, Null Kit took a moment to observe one of the flashlights in the distance and assess his new surroundings. But before he could attempt to estimate the light's origin, the flashlight's beam was suddenly wrenched upwards with a muffled yelp of terror and an uncontrolled gunshot into the ceiling, followed by the light dissapearing. With a mental gesture, Null Kit activated the low-light amplification sensors of his cybereyes, and the darkness was partially alleviated under its hazy green filter, giving him a fuller comprehension of the massive interior space of the warehouse, and what dangers might await inside such a maze. He walked forward, passing by another unarmed worker retreating from the chaos back into the office behind him.
Null Kit picked an aisle of shelving at random and began to press forward, spurred on by his proximity to Nocte - or if not him, at least someone else who had a respectable interest in flatlining corpsec - whilst listening out for the numerous sets of footsteps around him and attempting to pick out their rough location. Every few feet of distance, Null Kit would hear another loud but indistinct sound, occasionally punctuated with a shout or a spray of gunfire, and the number of footsteps reduced; a sensation that was both reassuring and unsettling to him as he moved further and further away from the only known way out of the warehouse. Another few feet, and he spotted a corpse - head twisted a nauseating full 180 degrees - haphazardly crammed between two crates in the shelving.
A bright flash flared up in the distance, and Null Kit instinctively pressed himself up against the shelving, squinting at the rapidly moving beam of light. With another gesture, a portion of his vision lurched forward and zoomed in along the projected direction of his rifle. At the far end of the warehouse, a trio of guards huddled around eachother, scanning their surroundings with weapons and flashlights, visibly distressed at their situation. The tallest of the three - an absurdedly muscular Troll that seemed to barely fit in his vest and uniform - stepped to one side and grabbed onto the side of an inactive heavy forklift-drone, effortlessly tipping it onto its side and dragging it back to his position as a sturdy makeshift barricade for himself and his compatriots.
"COME ON OUT!" The Troll roared into the darkness, voice quaking with rage. "ONLY A FUCKING COWARD HIDES!" One of his friends shouted in agreement, even if the shaking of their weapons as they scanned the walls and ceiling for movement betrayed their true feelings on the matter. Null Kit hunched down, shrouded in darkness, and began lining his sights up on the troll...
A loud bang echoed through the warehouse. One bullet flew from where the trio of guards were held up and struck the ground near Null Kit's feet, then another flew by and embedded itself in a crate. Acting on instinct and adrenaline, Null Kit launched himself to his right and threw himself into a gap between two shelved crates to take cover from the sudden assault/
"CONTACT!" Shouted a second voice from the other end of the warehouse, and within a fraction of a second the aisle of shelves was lit up with a hail of supressing gunfire that shoved Null Kit further into his hiding-spot. "I see you, asshole!"
Feeling indignant that someone else had the audacity to use low-light vision hardware like he did in lieu of waving around a flashlight like an idiot, Null Kit pulled out from his jacket a tiny black box, barely bigger than his hand, and approached the edge of his hiding-spot. Every shot that impacted near his position sent a jolt of adrenaline through his body, but it was nothing compared to the full-body shudder of shock, anger, and - to his surprise - distress, when a stray bullet tore through the corner of the crate he hid behind and buried itself into the side of his prosthetic arm, with an audible ping and clatter of shattering ceramics.
Null Kit flinched as shards of the crate and his arm bounced against his mask, but was ultimately delayed only by a half-second as he leaned over and threw the black box from his hiding place, listening to it bounce against a crate and slide down the aisle dowards his asilants. Null Kit emptied the rest of his magazine with a retaliatory spray of gunfire, before retreating further into his cover.
"Got something for you..." he snarled under his breath, as crept towards a smaller gap on the other side of the shelves, squeezing through and emerging onto the adjacent aisle. A split-second later, the black box he had thrown erupted in a dazzling display of strobing lights, turning that section of the warehouse into a blinding lightshow that did little to stop his attackers hail of gunfire but kept their attention nontheless, the Troll making quite clear his displeasure of having his low-light optics whited out from the flashing lights by way of a very creative string of expletives.
Pushing himself through yet another tight gap in the shelves to the next aisle, Null Kit hit the magazine-release and replaced his non-lethal munutions with a fresh mag of solid-core penetrating cartridges, and began quietly trotting down the aisle - passing by two more warehouser-workes fearfully huddled in their own alcove without slowing down - and approached under the masking sound of frenzied carbines firing off into the lightshow, intending to flank and get the drop on the corpsec a little more creatively, and hopeing that he wouldn't have to double-back into what would inevitably be more heavily-armed security heading his way.
Yet another mental command and Null Kit's cyberdeck hummed back to life, fans growling, scanning for icons in the direction of the guards. Surely enough he pinged three commlinks of unremarkable quality and, choosing to ignore the multitude of other pans closing in behind, wasted no time in sending out strings of incendiary code as he continued his approach. Even while distracted, the defences of the comlinks were effortless to crack compared to the Barghest office-host not a few minutes prior, and Null Kit allowed himself an evil grin as he discovered two of the three firearms were wirelessly connected to their respective PANs. Null Kit approached the end of the corridor, and sent a single forked command...
Three carbines worth of aggressive, suppressing gunfire immediately dropped to one, as a pair of magazines dropped out and fell to the floor.
"Oh DRE--!" the rightmost elven guard couldn't even squawk out his expletive in full as Null Kit rounded the corner of the shelving-unit and opened fire with a full-auto salvo. The bullets passed through the guard's vest without slowing, embedding themselves into the warehouse wall as their target twisted and fell to the floor. The other two scrambled back behind the upturned forklift, the Troll having the presence of mind to grab a fresh magazine from his vest and slot it in. Null Kit stepped back into cover as the Troll blindly fired downrange, sending a shower of splintered plastic and packaging material into the air. Null Kit retaliated in kind, using the built-in camera on his rifle to spray back at the troll from the safety of cover. The Troll's remaining partner drew his sidearm, and began to circle around the forklift, cautiously looking for a possible way to flank the suppresed Null Kit...
And, to the sound of clattering shelves, a shape descended from the ceiling.
A lithe metahuman, clad in a white mask and blood-soaked jumpsuit, fell upon the Troll and locked his hands around his neck. The Troll, gasping out in shock, jerked up from his hiding-spot and launched his whole body backwards into the wall behind him, smashing his assailant between a concrete wall and several hundred pounds of angry, musclebound flesh and armor. The remaining guard whipped around to draw a bead on the figure, but this fatal moment of distraction was all Null Kit needed to lunge out from cover and fire a single accurate burst, redistributing the guard's cranium across the wall behind him.
Null Kit turned his rifle towards the struggling Troll and fired off a round into his arm, but to no obvious effect or detriment. Another round fired at his leg, but the bullet harmlessly slammed into the interposing forklift instead. Having seen how little effort it took for his munitions to punch through his prior target's armored vest, Null Kit was struggling to draw a meaningful bead on the target that wouldn't risk overpenetrating and striking Nocte, still hanging onto the Troll's neck for dear life, and with reinforcements no doubt approaching from behind, time was running short...
Thankfully, Null Kit was spared from making the cold equation, as Nocte's fingers began to clench down and tear into the Troll's throat with unsettling ease. In spite of the Troll redoubling his efforts and crushing Nocte against the wall whilst striking his head best as he could with his flailing horns, Nocte refused to loosen his grip, and with a sickeningly wet rip, both hands pulled out holding a chunk of freshly ripped throat. The Troll's panicked shouts immediately petered into a pitiful gurgle as he staggered forwards, before finally dropping face-down onto the cold concrete floor.
"What in the drek was...!" Null Kit muttered to himself, lowering his rifle. Nocte stood limp over the bulky corpse, staring breathlessly at the Troll's life quietly fading away - and if Null Kit's ears didn't deceive him, briefly letting out a raspy, drawn-out chuckle - before slowly drawing his eyes in Null Kit's direction. An primal, terrifying sensation ran up Null Kit's spine, and he froze...
"You..." Nocte spoke in a quiet, hollow tone, not sounding the least bit perturbed or even winded in spite of what had happened. "You weren't going to shoot?"
"I... fuck no!" Null Kit replied, repelled. "Y--.... y'know what, never mind, I'm... we're done here, we need to jet, now." The two of them had no difficulty in hearing the distant sounds of sirens in the distance and commotion from back where they entered the warehouse. "There's gotta be a door on this side. We can circle back round to the car lot, snag a car and--"
"Not gonna happen." Nocte interrupted bluntly, tilting his head with a cathartic crackle of joints. "Even if you could hotwire one without us being noticed, they'd zero on the car before we could make it down the street."
"Aight, fair... How about the Kurabokko buildings, just south of where we are?" Null Kit asked, handing his rifle and remaining magazines over to Nocte, who accepted them without a word whilst Null Kit drew his sidearm - a lovingly personalised machine-pistol.. "They're security's Lone Star, and they don't like sharing info with Dragoon. If we can make it across, we can dodge the dragnet until--"
"Until our friend on the force comes to pick us up. Yes, that'll work." Nocte times in, already turning and jogging to the other corner, where their only viable exit awaited. Nocte peered cautiously through the door: The immediate coast was clear to their surprise, save for a pair of roto-drones - one a simple eye-in-the-sky mobile camera, the other a larger security model baring a short-barreled firearm under its chassis - slowly circling the warehouse perimeter. Nocte gestured at Null Kit's silenced rifle, but the Decker had different plans.
"Eyes on the drones, trust me..." Null Kit whispered, as multiple cracking programs rematerialised in his vision, and targetted what was hopefully their final obstacles. A moment later the security drone wobbled briefly, tilting to one side, before ascending several feet and pointing its weapon at its unarmed companion. With a satisfying pop of gunfire, the camera-drone fell out of the sky in an erratic buzzing spiral, one of its two rotors having been effortlessly smashed by two pistol calibre gel-rounds shot at point-blank. The security drone then followed its betrayed friend, cutting off its engines and falling onto the asphalt below in a discordant finale of smashing ceramic and plastics.
"Why'd they--...?" Nocte cut himself off and glanced at Null Kit, who had already began tapping the side of his head with his index and middle finger. "Of course..." He patted Null Kit on his shoulder, before breaking into a quiet jog away from the warehouse.
"Little trick I learned from our rigger. Those guys are gonna be so mad..." Null Kit whispered back, tone laced with mischievous glee as he took off after Nocte. Looking back, neither Null Kit nor Nocte had to focus hard to see that it wouldn't be long before local security would finish clearing the warehouse and be on their tail very soon, and so the two wasted no time in surreptitiously leaving the premises of the warehouse and crossing a few fences and pathways into the comparatively safer Kurabokko territory.

Guest1 - : Hey, you in the area? We need a pickup.
Unknown Contact - : What'd you do?
Guest1 - : Datasteal got derailed, things went loud, and we've got Statesmen pulling up.
Guest1 - : Crossed into Kurabokko turf though, your jurisdiction.
Unknown Contact - : Looking for an arrest?
Guest1 - : And a fresh change of clothes for the other guy, he's covered in claret.
Unknown Contact - : Did he make it out okay?
Guest1 - : No, he turned himself in after having a change of heart and converting to catholicism, they're crucifying him in the parking lot right now.
Guest1 - : SoCo?
Guest1 - : He's fine, for fuck's sake. Now can you come pick us up?
Unknown Contact - : Be there in a few, stay low.
Guest1 - : Got it.

The two runners skulked between locked-down buildings, Null Kit scanning corpsec matrix-icons for pursuing threats whilst following the stealthier Nocte's lead as he led the two through the safest path towards safety. HTR had arrived on the scene in force and were following Nocte's path of carnage to the warehouse with the intent of surrounding the whole property, meaning any protracted fight before they could leave jurisdiction would end spectacularly poorly for both Null Kit and Nocte, a fact that made their methodical escape as tense as the firefight they had left. It was only once they had crossed over the empty dividing roads between Barghest and Kurabokko and were out of the sight of Dragoon's dragnet that either of them could afford to slow down and exhale.
Comfortably distanced from Barghest's territory, the two runners hunkered down in an unused shipping-container, ears alert for the blood chilling pitter-patter of Kurabokko's kimono-clad drones. Nocte leaned against the inside walls of the container as Null Kit - rapidly feeling the exhaustion of what had occurred catching to him as his stimulants began to run their course out of his system - wearily began fishing through his duffelbag, now proudly adorned with a single bullet-hole.
"Sent a message to SoCo..." Null Kit wheezed, stuffing his armor and rifle back into his bag. "I told him to bring some clean clothes too, save you the trouble of looking like a killer from a crap horror trid..."
"Good. Did you get what you were after? Gods help me if you didn't..." Nocte whispered, letting himself slump down into a more comfortable squatting position and sliding his blood-splattered mask off his face. Null Kit didn't answer at first, and simply pulled his cyberdeck from out of his trouser-pocket and swiping his finger across the side. With a metallic plink, a tiny storage-chip barely bigger than a fingernail slid out, which was picked up and held between Null Kit's thumb and finger.
"Got it all on here. We'll know exactly who the fancy new chrome is made for, how it's being made and where it'll be delivered to." Null Kit answered in a smug tone of voice. "I also futzed with some other records to throw off their trails, and snagged some other stuff..."
"And?" Nocte pressed, shutting down any intention of Null kit to obfuscate with a suspicious glare that pierced through his cybereyes and into what passed for his soul, inciting a subdued flinch from Null Kit.
"And... some other commissions I saw that the old lady living a few floors up from me would pay handsomely for..." Null Kit confessed, shrugging in mock-guilt as he placed the datachip into a small metal carry-case, before tucking it into his pocket along with his deck. "I'll split you in on it, but only because that prat Redhat's not paying us extra for going in just the two of us. Bastard..."
"Thanks, but no." Nocte said, idly Inspecting his own mask and wiping its surface with the one part of his sleeve still free of blood.
"Oh, well if you insist, I guess. But seriously, why not?" Null Kit said, switching his tone from transparent sarcasm to slightly paranoid curiosity without slowing down, as he began to roll up his right sleeve.
"I'm already rich." Nocte said with a devilish, wide-mouthed grin. "I just did this because I thought it could be fun."
Null Kit did not answer, and simply shot an incredulous glare back to Nocte before turning his attention to his cyberarm, now uncovered by his bullet-ripped coat sleeve: Embedded in a spider's-web of cracked ceramic and polymers was the fragmented remnants of a rifle-calibre bullet. Most of the fragments had ricochet off to one side, and none of the remaining ones had managed to penetrate sufficiently deep to damage the arm's more important innards, but Null Kit couldn't help but feel uncomfortable at the alien sensation of several pieces of metal 'harmlessly' embedded in his arm that had shredded the outer-surface of what he had considered his skin. And so, until he could reach his preferred cyberdoc before removing bullet-fragments, he elected to simply turn off that section of haptic inputs entirely and deal with the loss of sensation in that area for the time being.
"Get hurt any?" Nocte asked, leaning over and peering at Null Kit's arm. Nocte was far less versed in matters of cybertechnology, beyond what experience had taught him in engaging heavily-chromed targets, but the sight of artifice masquerading as metahuman flesh was strange and uncanny, to a point of being difficult not to steal a glance in morbid curiosity.
"Nothing in the meat. You?"
"One in the calf, couple of glances here and there. And the whole matter with the big guy and the wall..." Nocte responded whilst rubbing the back of his head, a tad uncomfortably nonchalant about being shot for Null Kit's taste, reputation for unnatural vitality aside. "Don't bother with the medkit, I'll walk it off." he insisted, receiving a tilted expression of confused acceptance in response as Null Kit stuffed a half-open first-aid kit back into his bag.
A few more minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, until a buzzing erupted from within Null Kit's duffelbag, prompting a sudden full-body flinch from the borderline-dozing Null Kit.
"That'll be SoCo." Null Kit muttered, reaching into his bag and pulling out a cheap burner-commlink, bringing the display to life with a flick of his thumb:

Unknown Contact - : Coming up to your hidey-hole, I think. Can one of you wave me down?
Guest1 - : I'll do it, husbando's still unpresentable, remember?
Unknown Contact - : Point.
Unknown Contact - : You can pack your crap in the trunk while I get him sorted out
Guest1 - : Yeah yeah, I'll give you two lovebirds your privacy while you change ;)
Unknown Contact - : And I won't put the boot to your head to make it look real
Unknown Contact - : ;)
Guest1 - : Whatever, I call shotgun.
Unknown Contact - : Nope, you're both sitting in the back. Suspects, remember?
Guest1 - : Whatever.

"Was it him?" Nocte asked, eyes lit-up and voice briefly atypically chipper for someone Null Kit considered as passionate as a water-logged corpse. A harsh light flared through the gap between the container doors as the familiar sound of an old but powerful car engine rumbled into earshot.
"Either that or we're about to get shot the fuck up." Null Kit replied, standing up and walking past Nocte. "I'm gonna assume not and head out while you get dressed." Nocte nodded in silent agreement, straightning his back with another symphony of creaking joints.
Null Kit pushed the container door ajar and squeezed outside, reflexively shielding his eyes from the glare of police-issue headlights. Leaning on an unmarked pursuit-car was one Geoff Simeon, 'SoCo' to Null Kit and their mutual acquaintances, dressed in plain clothes with a vest and badge beneath a sturdy synthleather jacket and looking down at Null Kit with a stack of freshly-pressed clothing under his arm. The two traded a glance, an expression that said: I despise you and every iota of your personality and ethics, but we will put on a pretense of tolerance for eachother for the sake of professionalism and inability to avoid police suspicion for what we would actually want to inflict on eachother.
"He's in there, hope you brought deodorant." Null Kit said, casually pointing a thumb behind him as he passed by the wall of muscle and let himself into the back seats of the idling car. As SoCo let himself into the container and shut the door behind, Null Kit took a moment to wipe the remainder of the dried blood from under his nose, and settled into the faux-leather seats. A few simple mental commands, and Null Kit was once again comfortably opening a multitude of matrix windows, unbothered with concerns of matrix-security or Grid Overwatch retaliation for the first time since this run had started.

//SECURE CHANNEL OPENED//

Null Kit - : Hey, we're back.
Null Kit - : Line's safe, you can reply.
Redhat - : Buddy! Did you get that thing I asked for?
Null Kit - : I'm not your buddy
Null Kit - : But yes, we procured the data, but things got loud on our way out.
Null Kit - : I tampered with some unrelated files to cover our intentions but I can't guarantee they won't shift some appointments around to cover the breach.
Redhat - : Pobody's Nerfect my guy, but you got what we needed, I knew you two would pull it off!
Redhat - : You did both make it out, right?
Null Kit - : Yes, but this was definitely not a two-person job, contrary to your pitch.
Null Kit - : Maybe hazard hazard-pay is in order?
Redhat - : We'll see when I get a look at what you've got.
Redhat - : But trust me, if this falls through I'll round up a full crew for the next, promise!
Redhat - : How loud did it get? I've got HTR on the radio scanners, and they are nettled.
Null Kit - : Nothing we couldn't handle, and our getaway's looking clean. We didn't leave anything that could link us to what happened, rest assured.
Null Kit - : That said, the other guy did leave more than a few corpses.
Redhat - : Not ideal but hey, it happens in our line of work.
Redhat - : Surprised you both got away with it at all, Barghest doesn't fool around with security, y'know?
Redhat - : Take some time to lay low and meet me at the usual place, saturday evening.
Redhat - : We'll take a look at what you find and talk about the next steps, have a drink or five!
Null Kit - : And?
Redhat - : And compensate you for your work, sheesh
Redhat - : You're not much for fun kid, gotta loosen up!
Redhat - : But I didn't hire you for your conversation skills ;)
Redhat - : Ciao!

//SECURE CHANNEL CLOSED//

Null Kit leaned his head back and, savouring the precious remaining moments before his accomplices would return to the car, exhaled deeply through his blood-crusted nostrils, drifting from his adrenaline and stimulant high into placid contemplation. The events replayed through his head - his virtual claws sinking into the spider, the fear in the warehouse worker's face as she hid from him, shock and fear of bullets passing by and hitting his arm, Nocte's sickening execution of the remaining rent-a-cop - and after mulling over what had happened, a single thought entered Null Kit's head, one that he couldn't help but vocalise...
"What show was that spider watching...?"