User:Nyerguds/Silvia/Month 1

This story shows how Silvia has been living in the first month after her arrival in the world of London Dawn

Silvia - Devil on the Loose

by Nyerguds

"Hush now." the woman in the black suit said softly to the baby sitting snugly inside a makeshift baby sling on her chest. Her voice sounded oddly distorted through the helmet she was wearing, but the baby didn't seem to care. She looked around the luxury apartment, and looked around for the typical white half-spheres. No motion alarm system. Hah. They didn't expect anyone to get this far without triggering a few on the way anyway. Yes, she'd be all right here for a few hours.

She pulled open the fridge and started rummaging though the food. It still amazed her how common fresh unprocessed meat was in this world. "Looks like we're having steak today." She smiled under the helmet.

She looked around for security cameras. She didn't really expect any though; most people don't like having cameras in their living quarters, and prefer to put them in the corridors. But you couldn't be too careful. When she was sure nothing was spying on her, she took off the helmet, revealing shoulder-length light brown hair that nearly completely covered her pointy elven ears.

She had come in through the air conditioning system. The aluminium was ridiculously easy to get through with her claws, and the vents were big enough to crawl through, even with the baby strapped on her chest. And no one expected anyone to get into a vent at the top of the roof. She had learned quite fast that it was a bad idea to break through windows, since they often contained alarm systems, but vents were incredibly easy to get through if you had claws to keep you from falling some fifty meters down in the long vertical shaft. Another rule was not to fall for the stereotype of nightly burglary. People were home at night. During the day, everyone was away at work or school; a city full of activity, but with all of its living space completely deserted. On top of all that, the police was a lot less violent here, and absolutely not equipped to deal with someone with her kind of extraordinary abilities. It was like taking candy from a baby. She couldn't help feeling bad for them sometimes.

But she had to eat. She had to survive. She had a daughter to take care of, and that pushed all guilt out of the way. She'd do anything to protect her daughter.

A few minutes later, two steaks were sizzling in a pan on the electric cooking plate. She liked them well-cooked; her living style didn't allow her the upper class luxury of eating the meat mostly raw inside. She needed her food to be easy to digest.

She looked through the living chamber for anything useful to scavenge. The apartment was a typical upper class dwelling. A single young man or woman on the upper half of the social and corporate ladder, no partner or kids because of a lack of time, compensating for stress with a luxury apartment in the rich part of the city. Too much money, not enough time to spend it. But, thankfully, not paranoid enough to spend it on security.

Not like the inhabitant would miss those steaks, or whatever else she might take.

After the meal and a quick shower together with her daughter, she examined the window. As expected, a small electric wire ran across it, ready to trigger an alarm if the window was opened without deactivating the alarm She suspected the controls to be right outside the apartment's front door, and obviously also securing that door. Silvia stripped a wire from a nearby lamp with her claws, connected the two contacts on the window edge with it, and opened the window.

No alarm sounded. So far, so good.

Looking in the direction of the bedroom, she hesitated. It had been so long since she'd slept in a real bed. She'd been lucky to find some camping equipment she could set up on a rooftop or under a bridge, but the first was too rainy and the second was too crowded. It seemed this city had its population of homeless people after all; it hadn't been as utopian as its blue sky had indicated, and some of these homeless people were really desperate. Some were also quite badly disfigured. She heard somewhere that the mutations were a leftover from a nuclear attack on the city. She shuddered thinking about it, remembering how her own home, Geneva, had been reduced to a ghost city when the soil's very life essence had been destroyed by the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb. The actual nuclear part of the bi-nuclear bomb had been contained by the heroic actions of the dragon Roszondas, but that didn't change the fact the city had been rendered dead and uninhabitable.

Focus, Sil she thought. You can't stay; the guy will come home.

Or would he? There was no guarantee. Some of these people regularly spent the night at some lover's place. It was only 11 o'clock; surely she could sleep for a few hours...

She sighed, giving into temptation. She blocked the front door with a big sofa from the living room, stripped off the Akuma suit, and put the inner part of the suit and her underwear in the washing machine. By the time anyone would get through her blockade, she'd be wide awake and ready to leave. She just hoped it wouldn't be too soon; running off with her suit all wet and soapy would really suck.

She found a few pyjamas in the closet next to the bed, put one on, set the alarm clock to 15:00, and went to sleep, mentally blocking out the annoying hum of the washing machine.

A small click could be heard when the radio alarm clock turned on its speakers. Even before the radio started playing, Silvia was wide awake, and she turned off the alarm as soon as the first words came out of it.

It took a while for the situation to come back to her. With the feeling of the mattress and the pillow, she half-expected to wake up in the dirty room rented out as apartment where she lived in Washington FDC. She quickly realized that she was still in this strange new world which she could probably never leave. It was an odd sensation, knowing she had to be less on her guard now she was living as a full-time burglar.

She yawned, stretched her arms out, and looked at the baby lying next to her. Anyasi was staring at her with wide-open eyes, but didn't make a sound. She opened her mouth in a smile when she saw her mother was awake. "Ogah!" the baby said, not yet able to make sense of the world of words. Silvia smiled. "Yeah, I'm awake now. Let's see if you're done producing some more mess in your pants, and then let's get going."

She took her clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer for half an hour, taking care of Anyasi's needs while waiting for her clothes to dry.

After she got suited up again, she decided to be friendly this time, and put the sofa back on its place. At least the owner would get back in without needing to resort to property damage now.

With the sofa back on its place, she opened the window, looked back at the apartment that had served as her sleeping place for this day, and jumped out. Her wings quickly grew out of her shoulder blades, and she glided away. On the streets below her, people were leaving office buildings and heading home.

At least one of them wouldn't be too pleased to find his bed had been slept in, his steaks were gone and his window's alarm and air conditioning system were vandalized.

The police would be baffled by the weird claw marks inside the air vents.

Silvia wouldn't give a damn. She'd be looking for her next free hotel room, hoping everything there would go as smoothly as it went this time.