Participants:
| Scene Title | Evacuation Protocol |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Anne outlines her evacuation procedure and limitations. Practice begins. |
| Date | February 9, 2009 |
Village Renaissance Building, Fourth Floor Safehouse
She's been curious, and busy today. A morning spent in physical exercise with the punching bag she bought and set up in her training room where the archery practice also happens for stress relief, running into Minea Dahl when she went for food, encountering an engineer on the way home and googling him when she got here, checking in on the condition of Elvis… Now her thoughts turn to Anne. One of the disposable phones comes out, digits are tapped, and the call button pressed. She listens, and waits.
Ring! It takes about two moments after the first signal before Anne flips open her phone. "Hello!" It's a cheerful voice on the other end here. Appereantly soeone is having a good day, but then the return to health and being able to work again probably has somethign to do with that. Who likes being cooped up all day anyway. She flops down on one of the boxes she's finished stacking, leans back against the wall and relaxes. Good day.
"Anne," Cat begins, "I'm interested in talking more about the GPS idea you brought up at the meeting. Are you free to pay me a visit?" It seems she's speaking from somewhere indoors, given the lack of outdoor sounds making it through with her voice. "You sound like the illness finally got shaken off, too."
"What can I say, I had an awesome doctor. And sure, I'm up for that." Anne doesn't have anything against it at all. "If you sign up, m'lady, you'll be my first customer, as it were." Aside from the fact that she doesn't intend to charge for her services, anyway. But that's a minor detail, all in all. "Where are you at, and what kind of schedule where you thinking of? Like, right now, or in a couple 'f hours?" It all depends. Some people call in advance, and all, and some don't.
"When is good for you, Anne? I'm at number 14, East 4th Street in Greenwich Village. Best way to find me is to find the building and give me a ring, then go inside and head for the elevator to the left of the security desk. That way I can get there to meet you or even be ahead of the game."
Anne closes her eyes for a couple of moments, going silent on the other end of the line. Number 14… yeah, she knows which house that is. "If you just give me the floor and the number of meters in past a given wall, I can just come on in. Unless you'd prefer I use the door, of course." She can understand if that's the case, of course. Just, well. She's a spoiled little teleporter, okay?
It isn't a house. It's a six floor building with a rock club in the basement. "Oooh, even better," Cat replies, as she checks out the walls to either side of her, making a guess as to their distance apart. The corridor is long, not much to worry about. The walls in either side of that corridor, though… Maybe best to underestimate for safety, she thinks, not having a tape measure at hand. "I'm calculating now," she replies. "Just a moment." There's silence for a short time, and when her voice returns she says "Two. On the fourth floor."
It's not really that bad. If she gets it wrong Anne'll just flicker out again before she fully materializes, but. It's a bit of a stressfactor ending up in the middle of concrete. "Okay!" The phone is flipped shut even as she reaches over to grab her stuff, and about two seconds later Anne flickers into existance at the indicated spot. Her sense of direction is just that awesome. "Hey there, Cat! How're you doing? And. Mind if I start hugging you upon meetings? I mean, some people don't like that kind of thing." Abby sure didn't. "But I'm a total hugoholic."
The spot Anne has homed in on and hit is the center of a corridor's cross space, near the elevator spoken of earlier. Across from it is a door marked with an apartment unit number starting with 4.
"Generally not," Cat replies with a slight chuckle as the flutist appears nearby. She lowers the phone from her ear and ends the call. "This floor is a safehouse I'm establishing. The bottom three floors are public apartments, available for rent. The next floor is a recording studio, and the top floor's where I live now. That's why the cloak and dagger about coming here. Takes a key to make the elevator come here, or use the stairs."
"And I don't mind hugging, depending on where I am at the time."
Anne is going to take a chance then, and just step up to wrap her arms around the other woman and hug her tight. "Nice seeing you, Cat." Hug! Or, possibly, getting punched in the face, depending on Cat's reaction. "That's pretty cool. This the studio that Kinson will be using? He said something about possibly wanting my help with some of the music." The guy was definitely going to keep the 'face' role, but she didn't mind adding in some things for the ears.
"One floor up from here, and yes," Cat answers as she's encircled and squeezed, then squeezes back. "He's a decent guy with the most interesting talents, isn't he?" A smile is flashed. "Good to see you looking healthy again, Anne."
"It is, isn't it! That'll teach me not to go getting kicked around so much. But, since Claude is giving me lessons now I think I should start getting better soon. At least to the poin where I suck less. Now, you have to show me around your place. I'm too curious." She fires off one of her bright smiles at Cat, and starts looking around the corridor. So far, there's not really all that much exiciting to see. But then this is a corridor, not a museum. "What's your thought with having apartments downstairs? That doesn't worry you at all?"
"The thought is it costs money to run a safehouse, and mine could run out, so the apartments will provide income to keep things stable, along with the Rock Cellar and whatever can be earned from the recording studio. I may decide to start a label." Cat gestures with her hands. "This place isn't linked to my name, I've engineered that with the help of Wireless, so I don't act in such a way as to seem like I control it. The motley bunch of people who'll be seen coming and going from the upper floors are easily covered as guests and friends of eccentric musicians."
"These are good thoughts." Anne taps her chin for a couple of moments. "Hey.. do you think Wireless could help me out with selling my house? For obvious and sundry reasons I don't want to make a loud thing of it right now, but if I could get it sold before homesatan steals it, that'd be awesome." Means that she could do something useful with the money, instead of having the 'enemy' steal them, as it were.
"It's possible," Cat replies. "It certainly wouldn't hurt to ask her. Why would it be stolen, though?" She thinks that over for a moment.
"Because Edward, the grand idiot, dropped names all around people who work for homesec, and I'm pretty sure that if they figure out I'm in Phoenix, anything linked to mine is going to get frozen. So, I'm kind of trying to plan ahead, you know?" Anne's wasn't the only name dropped, of course, far from it. But, she still didn't want them to get her stuff.
"There is that," Cat replies gravely. She isn't happy about it either, her plan had been to get advantage on the Federal agents in the mix and know their names, have their images in the files so all of Phoenix could know them, but it is what it is. "There's value to team members knowing each other, but not quite like that," she states. The hall is crossed and the door to one of the units is opened with keycard, and she stands aside to let Anne go in. 412, this one is. A one bedroom unit with tasteful but inexpensive furniture, appliances, and electronics, it's about the size of a standard middle income apartment.
"I can't say I was happy about it, no. And quite frankly I don't trust the man. Do we still work with him?" Because if they did, Anne wanted to know about it. He hadn't done much to prove trustworthy, in her book. Rather the other way around. "You're right in that things are what they are, though. We can't do much about that, and there are other things we could focus our energies on. You wanted to ask me about my GPS thingies?" She pauses slightly there. "Really, we need to name them something different than 'thingies', but it works out well enough for now."
"I do, yes," Cat answers somberly. "It's very valuable. It would possibly have let us get that Brian and Al out safely. You could probably have blinked in and out before the numbing effect took hold of you. Is the procedure developed yet, and do we need to purchase the devices it works with?" Her attention is focused on the teleporter, face calm and businesslike now.
"Teo got it past Hana, so we actually have them already. I'm just not letting anyone get one until they have a talk with me first." Anne turns around to face Cat properly, at that. "It's not that I mean to exclude anyone, but. The truth is, these evacs are most likely going to be seriously dangerous, and I need people to know what I can and cannot help them with, before they call. Or we'll all end up screwed." Which really wouldn't help anyone. She nods slowly to the part about Brian and Al. "Yeah, maybe. Though.. I was unconscious at the time, I think, so. Not even I can be everywhere at once."
She settles into a chair and gestures for Anne to do the same, as she listens. Cat's recording it all, not that she could do otherwise, but unlike some things this stretch of memory is very much wanted.
Anne settles down as well, and rolls hr shoulder back in a slow circle. "Which kind of brings out the question, doesn't it. Are you wanting to have one of these too? I'm kinda hoping you'll say yes, since we don't want too many close calls." Maybe especially not with Cat's brain. Everyone was important, of course, it was just that if Cat went down, so did everyone else.
"I do," Cat confirms. "I'd think, obviously, that in addition to sending out the call for evac with the device, persons would need to be in an area with enough space for you to appear and grab them by physical contact."
"Yeah. I need room to fit, obviously. Also, they need to be aware of the timelimits involved. Like, if there's just one there's not much of a problem. It's just a second before I can leave, but.. if we go up to my maximum of four? I takes thirty seconds for me to jump. You can get shot a lot of times in thirty seconds, and if I'm hurt in transit with that many passangers?" Anne shakes her head a bit. "Just keeping a hold of everyone's bits is hard, then. I don't want to know what happens if my concentration breaks."
And she's thinking, quietly, while she listens about the ways teleportation can be used. "You need physical contact," Cat muses when the floor is hers. "Could you pop in behind the persons presenting the threat, grab their weapons, and send the weapons somewhere else to equalize situations while remaining on site?"
Anne shakes her head a bit. "Could pop in behind them, once I know where they are, but. The whole weapon thing gets tricky very fast. I'd have to be able to grab them, I'd have to stay still, and then I'd leave with the weapons and lotsa stuff. At least until I get better at this kind of thing, the only thing I can really do is evacuations. That might change, but." Right now, the rest is seriously advanced class things.
"A lot of it is self-training, I'd think," Cat muses. "Setting up stacks of items and experimenting with grabbing segments and vanishing with a specific desired portion of them, to fine tune how you can use the tool." Then her head shakes. "I'm digressing." A slight smile appears. "It's a thing I do."
"Maybe so." Anne replies with a careful kind of voice. "But… I'm not going to go around experimenting with people's lives, you know?" Besides. There was another thing Anne was working on right now, though she didn't want to say too much about it until she knew if she could pull it off and all. ESPECIALLY since she got the idea from a TV show about witches. Ssssh.
A nod accompanies her reply, as Cat offers "That's why I suggested groups of objects to practice with, until you master the direct and pinpoint control I was talking about. Or even, say, an object in the hand of a foam dummy, to work at being able to pluck the object without damaging the foam. But anyway, you were giving the GPS extraction class."
"That's pretty much all of it, really. Like I said, it's not huge. The next part is if you've got any questions. But.. yeah. Limited in number of people, and don't forget to separate between the codes for 'you'd be coming in hot' and 'we have a few moments to get away sneakylike'. If I'm coming in with bullets going every which way, that'll be a problem. Oh! And I'd be aiming for the spot where the GPS signal comes from. So please don't sit -inside- a box. There's gotta be room for me too, or I'll not be able to materialize."
She grimaces. It wouldn't be good for Anne to suddenly get cardboard in her spleen, no, not at all. "I can remember that," Cat assures with a spreading grin. "Want to practice with the system?"
Anne pulls up her bag and hands over one of the little gps things to Cat. "Sure. Though, what I need to practise most is my gps stuff, honestly. Like, what exactly does a certain longditude and latitude -mean-, in adresses and the like." It wasn't always as easy as it looked, that. Fortunately Anne was really good at this stuff, so she didn't expect there to be too many problems.
Taking it, Cat studies the device, determining if it can be worn like a wristwatch. "Best thing for that, I think, is traveling the city and comparing GPS coordinates with the buildings or outdoor places they match up with. Holding the device in hand, she rises and exits the room, intending to send the signal for a cold extraction from that spot. Let the practicing begin!
 February 9th: Going Native |
 February 9th: Present Company Excluded |