….my amazon book list is an unnecessary book haul just waiting to happen. Anyway, has anyone read any of these? have an opinion to offer? I’m thinking of buying an ebook of one of these soon but I don’t know which
Claire RozenCrests Davidson’s mission had never been simpler: Sneak into a library and steal a book. Of course, there was a caveat: She had to sneak into the library from the roof, after running into pesky things like security guards and an infuriatingly hidden access to the restricted archives in the basement.
It was shaping up to be a “climb the brick with crumbling mortar and just think about the money” sort of day.
The latch to the rooftop door was secured not only by a lock, but also an alarm and both were easily disarmed with lockpicks and her favorite portable alarm jammer, respectively. And with that, Claire slipped into the library easily, enjoying the air-conditioned service hallway after having to scale the side of the building in the dead of Texas summer. All in all, fairly normal activities for a treasure hunter, but it had been a while since she had to steal from a university (not including that one time when she pretended to be a culinary arts major just to go to an evening gala and eat gum paste lilies like goddamn medieval royalty, despite not knowing what ganache really is).
Her instructions were to steal a book tucked away in the depths of the library archives and almost certainly defended by much more than a latch and a simple alarm, at least if the government had any say about it. A clatter from the stairwell below made her slip back into the shadows, or at least as much of a shadow as the flickering fluorescent lighting allowed.
Not for the first time that night, Claire thanked the fates that she had decided to wear the suit with a cloaking device.
Additional rolling clatter from below: a figure in a uniform, pushing a cart, one of the janitorial staff, moving to the service elevator.
Claire waited until they had entered the service elevator and then she quietly made her way down the stairwell, all the way to the bottom. She had to stop once or twice and activate the cloaking mechanism when another uniformed person entered the stairwell, so lost in thought that they probably wouldn’t have noticed her even if she hadn’t made herself look like part of a concrete wall.
A faint buzzing sound greeted her ears as she finally arrived at the bottom: an emergency exit to her left and a heavy-looking metal door to her right, from which the buzzing sound emanated. Claire reached around to her backpack and took out her scanner. It was small and deceptively light, but Claire had designed it herself and knew that it was more advanced than it seemed. Switching it on, she turned back to the door and scanned it, as well as an even ten feet to either side. Behind the door was a simple motion-activated alarm rigged to send a signal to a security room somewhere on the floor above her. More complicated was the pressure alarm, which would go off the moment the door was opened or if a person stepped on a single floor of the room.
Time for the key cracker.
Claire grinned. She loved that thing.
This device looked a bit like a handheld radio crossed with a smartphone, cobbled together by people who had never taken an engineering design class before, but it was the brainchild of Claire and Colton and hadn’t failed her once in five years. She made herself comfortable on the floor and started hacking into the alarm systems, twiddling between the screen and wires and always (always) keeping an ear out for anyone from the stairwell.
A half-hour passed before she figured out how to bypass the pressure alarm (the motion sensor had been deactivated within two minutes—typical for most academic institutions, which tended to have lax security measures, especially in Texas). Stretching her arms, she picked up the scanner again, just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
No alarms.
Perfect.
Before the mission began, she had made a copy of a generic security badge for the library and this is what she used now to enter the room, carefully holding the handle to ensure that the metal door closed behind her with nothing louder than a soft click.
This room was colder than the outside, only lit by faint fluorescence lights, and dry enough that Claire could feel her hair growing more staticky by the minute.
It was plain in its design, sterile and filled with multiple locked glass and metal cases. The locks were simple pinpads, but now Claire needed to figure out which case held the book she needed and to get out before security made their rounds again, roughly in another half-hour.
Her client had told her it was hard-bound, with gold runes embossed on a brown leather cover, and heavier than it looked, as it was said to be only somewhat larger than a Moleskin notebook. Perhaps if Claire had been gifted with supersight or x-ray vision, she’d be able to figure out which case was correct, but alas, she had been gifted with tons of money and a personal lab, courtesy of her father’s business and supplemented with her own income.
Time for the scanner again.
The screen output was grainier than eyesight would have been, but a few taps later Claire had modified it to look for gold atoms, which winnowed her choices down to three cabinets that might have it: One in the top back corner, one conveniently just to the left and bottom from where she stood, and then one to the right of a glass case that doubled as a table, judging by the paperwork littering its top.
Five minutes later, she had figured out that the closest cabinet held a gold statuette, too small to be worth the hassle of stealing and finding a fence, and the one near the glass case had to be too large to be a book, possibly a box of some sort and while pretty, also pretty uninteresting to her wallet.
That left the one that she was too short to reach without a stepstool, dammit.
Absentmindedly, she checked her grippy gecko shoes, making sure the soles were still sticky. It was tricky, climbing up the flat metal and glass surfaces to reach the case that had to be fifteen feet off the ground. It was even trickier to do it while manipulating the key cracker, but at last she held the book in her hands.
It was slim but very heavy, heavier than a leather-bound book that small should be, and it felt warm with its own heat despite the chill of the basement. Claire knew a few languages, but runes were beyond anything she had ever studied, so she shrugged and tucked it in her backpack.
Fifteen minutes left.
“Stop what you’re doing, and hand the book over,” said a voice from below.
Claire peered down (a trick given how tucked up she was), and saw a young woman in some sort of spandex suit emblazoned with a Titan Force badge, her fists raised. The lights were too dim and Claire hadn’t activated her night vision contact lenses, but she made out dark hair and dark eyes, and brown skin. She had very serious eyes and if Claire knew anything from her previous run-ins with Titan Force, that meant they hadn’t sent a bumbling kid after her this time. Dammit. Claire could try to get away by climbing, but she hadn’t met this particular member of Titan Force yet and, as this was the first woman they had sent after her in years, she was curious. (The last person who had confronted her so seriously was Devin, who turned out to be an utter asshole even if his kisses were quite nice and she had been rather relieved when he broke up with her to go on some Eurotrip with his dad and had returned with a new girl on his arm and a marginally better attitude.)
Claire lightly hopped down near the woman, who still had her fists up and watched her warily. Up close, Claire could see dark freckles dusting her face and a strange set of symbols next to the Titan Force badge that she could guess meant higher rankings of some sort. And she was incredibly short—Claire had almost half a head of height over her.
Claire raised her eyebrows and felt a smile curve her lips. “Aw, Titan Force sent someone new! How nice. I don’t believe we’ve met? I’m Claire.” She took advantage of the surprise on the super’s face to finish tightening her backpack straps; she had a feeling things were about to get interesting.
The woman didn’t lower her arms a fraction. “Maria,” she said stiffly. “You must be the thief.”
“So formal! I prefer Claire, actually. Well met, Maria. You’re a much prettier sight than Streetslam. How’s that asshole doing, anyway?” Claire started to angle herself back to the stairwell.
“Stop stalling and hand the book over.”
“Hmm, let me think: no.” Claire pushed off against the cabinets and leapt over Maria’s head to the next row of cabinets, and then hopped from there to the next row. Whatever Maria’s superpowers were, Claire wasn’t interested in being their direct target.
She felt the temperature in the room drop by several degrees and then her ankles yanked and her viewpoint had inverted upside down. Her head smacked with a dull thud into metal. Groaning, Claire pulled herself up to free her pinned ankles.
Ice, frosty white and at least an inch thick, bound her ankles to the metal, leaving her to dangle helplessly.
The source of the ice hopped down from the opposite row of cabinets, and even from this angle Claire could see the irate expression on Maria’s face and her hands held up like she was in a martial arts sparring match.
“Hello again, Maria,” Claire said cheerfully, even as she felt blood rushing to her head. “Or do you prefer to be called La Helada? Quite a nice superhero name, I must say. It’s memorable.”
“Give me the book, now, before I just take your entire backpack,” Maria said.
“Thieving from the thief?” asked Claire, subtly moving her hand to her collar to activate one of her many, many backup plans. “Rather forward of you to pin me like this. I usually prefer a dinner date first, darling.”
Maria’s face noticeably reddened and she clenched her hands. “Shut up.” With her unclenched hand, she reached for the clasps of Claire’s backpack, fumbling with their locking system and accidentally brushing up against Claire’s back.
“Wow, and feeling me up? I don’t know if this should be considered police brutality or blatant antagonistic flirtation.”
Right as Maria’s hands finally reached the correct set of clasps that would unlock access to the book, Claire’s boots turned red-hot and shattered the ice. Claire had been prepared and ducked and covered at the last moment, but Maria was not and was thrown several feet away, sans-backpack. Claire rolled as she landed on the floor and was up on her feet and running for the exit, calling behind her, “You’ll need to be cleverer than that to steal from a thief, dearie.”
The glowing green sign of the exit door was finally in her sights and she vaulted over the glass-covered artifact tables towards it, idly wondering if the sounds of their fight had finally alerted the campus security and tripped the alarms in the library. Then again, they were campus security and notoriously lax once their first safety measures were cracked. She was probably fine.
Images of a fat check, made payable to the RozenCrests Davidson Engineering Lab, flashed through her mind. She might even get to replace her old stick welder this time around.
Claire was mere inches from reaching for the door handle when an attack from the side slammed her into the wall, arms and legs pinned by yet more ice.
Fuck.
Maria appeared along a trail of ice in a move that Claire had only seen before at the Winter Olympics, looking a little bit mussed and with some unfortunate cuts on her pretty cheeks and along the side of her forehead. Claire’s mind unbiddingly pointed out that her current predicament would have fulfilled a highly specific item on her bucket list, had Maria not looked like a particularly murderous Elsa and if she weren’t, you know, tied down by literal ice.
Claire mentally ran through her options. Her backup plans all required at least one arm or leg free, so that was a nope. Unless she wanted to activate her “only in case of impending death” option via her mouth, which didn’t sound pleasant and so, hard pass. Pinned like this, she couldn’t activate anything by using her backpack as the trigger, so that left one option: Her sass.
“We seem to keep running into each other,” Claire commented as Maria reached her, aiming directly for access to the backpack. She was close enough now that Claire could see the catch in her breath, her face flushed as she fumbled with the clasps yet again, now somewhat impeded by Claire’s greater height and also the backpack being pinned against the wall. Even this close and on her tip-toes, Maria seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact.
Claire had never been able to stand it when anyone ignored her and she especially couldn’t let La Fucking Helada ignore her of all people, so she tried again. “You know, the last time someone pinned me like this, there was a lot more physical action.” She looked down at Maria with a quirked brow.
“I’m sure,” Maria muttered with an eyeroll, now strategically aiming under Claire’s armpit to get at the backpack.
“Yeah, and it might shock a star pupil of the uptight, hoity-toity Titan Force just how much tongue was involved,” Claire said, deliberately boring a hole into Maria’s head with her eyes and willing her to fumble, just a little. “You don’t want to remove my mask and find out, even just a little?”
Maria sighed and started counting quietly back from ten in Spanish but didn’t stop with the backpack, damn her. They both heard the click of the final clasp coming unlocked and the top flipping up against Claire’s head to reveal the book nestled on the top. To her credit, Maria didn’t even stop to gloat, but snatched the book and was out the exit door between one breath and the next, leaving Claire to melt in silence.
Claire wished she had remembered to ask for her number because hey, you missed all the chances you didn’t take, right?
Either the basement itself couldn’t escape the Austin summer or La Helada apparently made quick-melting ice on purpose, but Claire had freed herself and escaped to the stairwell well before campus security arrived to notice the mess. Unfortunately, Maria and the book were long gone back to the precious Titan Force Headquarters, and Claire was left to admit that yet again, those assholes had bested her.
Well, not entirely: Her scanner picked up the tracker she had stuck to Maria’s skin during their fight, showing the super moving at a rapid pace to the center of the city.
With a chance at knowing the location, she had not yet exhausted all possible moves on the gameboard. Safely up on the roof, Claire looked up at the smog-faded stars and laughed.
A few days later, a post-it was stuck to the bottom of Maria’s coffee before she picked it up at her most-frequented shop, thanks to the simple skills of stalking and mild bribery of minimum-wage employees.
“I’ve been thinking of you since our last date and considered that you might be interested in something of mine in exchange for something of yours. You don’t strike me as being as much of a stubborn ass as Devin, so I hope you might consider. You know I like to spend my Friday evenings in libraries.
Note: You can follow the rest of the story via https://throughthedarkdays.wordpress.com/ or on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/21124070/chapters/50268290
So I’ve had a spectacularly shitty day today, which was entirely my fault. So I’m going to be taking fic prompts in an attempt to alleviate stress. I’ll be reblogging some prompt lists in just a bit.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: StreetSlam: Wishes of a Broken Time - Leon Langford
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Garrison Rygel/Chris Blaze
Characters: Garrison Rygel, Chris Blaze
Additional Tags: Fluff, First Dates, Water Basketball, hand holding
Summary:
Garrison was very proud of himself for working up the nerve to ask Chris Blaze out on a date. It was only after he’d asked Chris out that he realized that he didn’t actually have any plans for where they’d actually go. Which was how they ended up at the pool.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: StreetSlam: Wishes of a Broken Time - Leon Langford
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Garrison Rygel & Eva Hayes
Characters: Garrison Rygel, Eva Hayes
Additional Tags: Queerplatonic Relationships, Nonbinary Character, I headcanon Eva as bigender (demi girl and agender), First Dates
Summary:
Garrison and Eva go on a date, only to realize that the relationship they want might not be of the romantic variety.
