Meet the Crew, Part 2: Tom

A few thousand miles away from the mansion Maya just left, on the roof of a housing scraper several miles tall, Tom was looking through a pair of binoculars to scout out another building identical to the one he was on.

This building was about a mile away from the one Tom stood on, with nearly every inch of each wall made of glass. Behind him was his Shadow Jumper. He had cloaked before he entered the planet's atmosphere, but once he landed, he found that the lip of the building was about four feet high, more than enough to hide his ship from anyone below the level of the roof. As such, the ship was currently visible, although its paint was made to prevent the sun from making it sparkle.

Tom was looking at the 153rd floor out of the 212 floors of the adjacent housing scraper. Every building on Mystar was a mile or more away from each other, so the building he was scouting could indeed be considered "adjacent," if only loosely. T

hrough his binoculars, he was observing his target, Morris Pritchard. A relatively young man, considering how successful he was, Morris Pritchard had a full head of brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin, and a lean body. Currently, he was lounging on an absurdly long couch facing the window Tom was looking through, watching a scantily-clad woman dance with a smile on his face.

Next to the doorway behind Morris there stood a guard armed with an automatic gunpowder rifle. Tom also spied some shimmering in the window, indicating it housed electronics that could dim the room and become a TV screen.

On the wall to Tom's left was a bookshelf lined with snow globes, small statues, and other knickknacks. On the right wall were several expensive-looking statues and paintings, all extremely gaudy. A strange fact Tom noticed was the lack of actual doors. Instead, there were empty doorways leading into the next few rooms that he could see.

Morris was the owner of a weapons business called "Ol' Reliable Firearms," currently the only manufacturer of outdated gunpowder firearms. The old weapons were prone to jamming and frequent misfires, and to top it all off, the ammunition was extremely expensive since Ol' Reliable Firearms was the only company that made gunpowder.

Every other item, explosive, and gun manufacturer had moved on to much more efficient and powerful alternatives. However, the guns have become to be seen as a sign of prestige among the wealthier weapon owners of the galaxy, something that the Lightshow Weaponry board of directors didn't take kindly to. Tom was hired by Lightshow Weaponry to kill Morris and drive the company into the ground, something well within his skill set.

A trip down an elevator, over to the adjacent building, and then into the lobby brought Tom to the front desk. The front desk was a large, round counter set against the back wall, with a computer in the center of the counter, a gap to the right for staff to enter, and a young receptionist behind the front desk to greet people.

The receptionist looked up when she heard the doors open. "Hi! How can I…" The receptionist trailed off, disturbed by the Styx Tactical Armor Tom was wearing, along with the gun slung over his shoulder and the other holstered on his hip. She cleared her throat. "Ahem. How can I help you?"

"I need access to the elevator." These fancy housing scrapers always kept elevators locked from the ground floor, requiring the receptionist to allow access. They also didn't have stairs, as the elevators were designed to be as safe in a fire situation as out.

"May I ask what for?" The receptionist asked nervously.

"Business."

"I'll… need more information than that, sir."

"…" Seeing this would go nowhere, Tom walked off in the direction of the elevators. The receptionist let him go, believing he would make as much progress there as here. Just in case, she went to press a report of the suspicious person on her computer, before she fell against the front desk, asleep. Jutting out from her neck was a small dart. Tom holstered his dart gun, continuing to the elevator.

Once there, he looked at the small control panel next to the closed elevator door. Essentially just a screen, it currently had a large lock icon showing, with a red background. After extending his TK, Tom went to work on the lock. A few seconds later, the screen lit up with a green light, showing an unlocked lock, before becoming a 12-digit number keypad. Tom tapped the numbers 1, 5, and then 3, then hit pound.

The elevator door opened, and he stepped inside, unslinging his Vega SV rifle and pointing it at the door. He readied his TK. While he wasn't strong enough to block a bullet with his TK, if he timed it properly, then he could stop the bullet just before it exited the barrel. It required fast reflexes and a constant eye on the enemy's trigger finger, but Tom was confident in his reflexes.

The door opened, and the two startled guards next to it proved their competence by immediately moving to point their guns at the intruder. Unfortunately for them, Tom had already had his gun up, quickly tapping his rifle's trigger and burning a hole through the guards' faces. Luckily for Tom, his gun was pretty quiet, so the other guards (who were on the other side of the doorways) hadn't heard the commotion.

Using the small bit of an arm Tom could see poking out of the doorway into the next room as a reference, he held the trigger down on his gun, burning into the wall and then the head of the guard who was standing behind it. If the loud and startled exclamations from the other room were any indication, another guard had seen the commotion.

Walking into the next room with his gun pointed in front of him, Tom shot the man directly across from him, stopping the bullets of two guards to the right. Exerting his TK, Tom crushed the windpipes of those men, shooting them in the head while they were gasping for air.

Tossing a Hydra bomb into the room across from the elevator's room, he braced himself against the wall next to the doorway leading to the right. He rolled two Garvon gas grenades into the room. When the first room exploded and its walls collapsed, the Garvon gas grenades burst, filling the next room with Garvon gas within a couple of seconds.

After waiting for the choking sounds from the men inside to stop, Tom stepped away from the doorway, whipping his Vegas SM towards it and stepping inside. The entire room had a light blue tint from the gas. Each doorway had either one or two corpses next to them, and on the couches and chairs in the first room were the bodies of what looked to be businessmen, judging by their suits. It seemed Morris had had some guests over.

In the room Fate had entered were three doorways, one to his left and two in front of him. The one to the left looked to be some trophy room lined with animal heads and stuffed animal statues, the doorway to the right and front was a massive bedroom, and the doorway to the front and left was where Tom had seen Morris.

The bedroom was the first room Tom had seen with an actual door. Using his Tk to make a barrier in the doorway leading to Morris, Tom spread his senses through the other two rooms. The bedroom didn't have anyone in it, but the trophy room had some people cowering inside. A few smoldering corpses later, Tom strolled into the room that Morris was in, the gas covering the first few feet out of the doorway.

Inside, Morris was hunkered behind the large couch, along with the scantily-clad woman from earlier and the guard that was previously manning the doorway. While the other two were only known to Tom by his psychic senses, hunched behind the couch, the guard was crouching behind the couch with his gun pointed at the doorway.

As soon as Tom entered the room, the guard opened fire with his gun on full auto. Tom stopped the first bullet in the barrel, causing the next one to hit it and destroy the entire gun, blowing off the man's left hand with it.

The guard dropped his gun and grabbed his bloody and burnt stump, screaming. Tom ended his misery with a shot through the heart. Using his senses, he then shot through the couch and into Morris Pritchard, killing him instantly. The couch proceeded to catch fire from the blast.

Slinging his Vega SV over his shoulder, Tom pulled out his dart gun and walked around the couch, shooting the scantily-clad woman in the neck. He then extinguished the fire with his TK, blocking the oxygen from feeding it. The first part of his job done, he proceeded to check the bedroom and trophy room for any information to further the second part of the contract.

There was nothing much in the bedroom, but in the trophy room, Tom could sense an empty area behind a wall. Looking further using his Prodigy power, he found a source of electricity leading from the empty area into a nearby polar bear statue. The statue was posed like a typical bear statue, with the bear on its hind legs, its forelegs raised up, and its mouth open.

Pulling the bottom right canine of the taxidermy bear made a section of the wall to the right slide open and into the rest of the wall, revealing the empty space Tom had sensed. In it was a small desk, a luxurious chair, a large computer, and a filing cabinet. Checking all of these gave Tom exactly what he needed: information to tear Ol' Reliable Firearms down.

The room's contents showed that Morris Pritchard was supplying several rebel cells and multiple pirates with weapons, along with committing tax fraud. Using the computer in the room, Tom uploaded every bit of this information to the internet, sharing the IP address of the computer to show that it came from here. Tom then left, leaving the secret room open for the police, more than ready to head back to Narro and play Stomp Stomp Quest.