Anna took a breath, as she descended the stairs and rounded the corner.
After having stumbled on the manhole leading just outside Vault 114, she’d managed to make her way through the halls undetected. While she wasn’t the sneakiest person, her disposition for strategy and patience paid off, allowing her to act based on observations of Triggermen patrols and proper hiding places.
These same skills kept her well aware of Dino yammering away in front of the Overseer’s office, presumably to the missing Mr. Valentine. The man had his head so far up his own ass that, as Dino turned and ran off to confront his boss, he hadn’t seen or heard her silenced pistol fire.
He fell to the floor like a sack of bricks instead, mid stride.
Wasting no time, the thin woman sneaked her way along the wall, just under the Overseer’s porthole. She only stood when she reached the terminal, which came undone with a few keystrokes, all the while keeping quiet. In the few moments it took for the door to open, Anna took a breath and swallowed, readjusting her blue suit.
She then turned her head and looked into the dark room, her pistol by her side out of view. Her back was lit with unkind fluorescent lights, her red hair ablaze.
“Mr. Valentine?” she remarked wryly from the doorway. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not cut out for this new life underground.”
“Consider this a jailbreak, courtesy of one Ellie Perkins.”
Despite having a voice that could rival nails on a chalkboard, and a personality to match, Dino had been one of the few things keeping Nick near sane over the two weeks he had been locked up tight in his makeshift prison. There were only so many passive diagnostics to be run and he found he was slipping into less than pleasant cognitive functions where memories were filed through. Not his memories. He supposed it was the closest thing to a nightmare he could ever experience.
At least Dino taunting him across a few solid inches of glass gave him something to ground himself with.
Cigarette in hand ( one of his lasts, regrettably ), he peered at the back of the triggerman’s head as he stalked away, presumably to whine to his boss about being knocked off the gang. That was, until the man’s head blossomed with red and he fell stagnant to the vault’s floor. Nick nearly crushed his cigarette between his fingers, flecks of cooling ash falling from the tip.
The most unnerving thing about the following minutes was not being able to see, or even hear, the alleged shooter move outside. The first thing his processors picked up on were the mechanisms in the door shifting, a click signifying what he had been wishing for-- freedom.
“ I’d congratulate the damsel who managed to get down here, but I guess that’s not the correct distribution of roles here. ”
The first thing his optics zeroed in on was the blue suit ( color was a welcomed sight, the room being seeped with dulled shades on its own ) and then the contrast of her hair to the outfit. The introduction of new lights alone made him blink, the dimness of the space around him falling to obscurity. “ Right after I get done thanking you, remind me to thank her, ” he let the cigarette fall, heel grinding it into a flat collection of smoldered paper and ash.
“ Unless you want to take in the view of what I’ve been staring at for the past two weeks. . . ” Nick smoothed back the side of his trench coat, feeling for his pipe pistol. Still empty, but more useful in itself than being left with nothing. “ I’m about ready to get out of here, as you can probably imagine. ”
