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 Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 6:49 pm
"Yes, you really should return things. There are wait list for equipment. I've seen fights over machinery here. Probably good you didn't loose a few fingers." He said, and wondered just how many techs actually owned tazers around here. IT was now a worrying statistic he wanted to look into.
Surprised Mark was passing off $500 dollars for no reason, Melvin stood up a bit more. "Hmm. I would have liked to stay dead if it means that my stuff gets taken out of Lawr's home and possibly some of his stuff too. If that happens, I say leave it. I can do whatever paperwork needed to come back to life AFTER the fact. If that doesn't work like that, then I GUESS I'll be alive again." But only if it didn't bother Lawr in some way.
"If anything else, maybe just make the file look good. I doubt it says much except that I am working in the Runic department." Though...."Supreme Runic master wouldn't be half bad though....or Runic grand master." It had a nice ring to it.
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Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 10:45 pm
Mark was trying his best to keep a straight face. It started when Melvin started talking about losing a few fingers on tech - if that was a problem then maybe Caelius should be considered tech - and then the conversation simply escalated
- At some point he had put the whole conversation on voice record on his phone because it was too good not to share later.
"Cool, supreme runic master," some people sure were crazy delusional, Mark thought, "I'll just go ahead and add that. But you know, we should really look into this tazer problem, I mean like, think of how many other people could get randomly tazed. Maybe you should report it to your higher ups or something I mean it would super suck if something happened to me on the way out before I could finish your uh, edits."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:35 am
"Well, if people have tazers then they had to have gotten them runiced, and if someone has been doing them, then their might be paperwork listing who on the island owns one. If there isn't, I could always ask the techs to show me how to runic one as if I got a personal request to do one from a client to see who has experience and ask them how many they've done. If I notice it's a large number that isn't documented, then I'll bring it up to my superiors that weapons outside of our own need to be documented to prevent people getting things like blow torches and whatever else without it being monitored. Last thing we need is someone with one of those in their room taking out an entire dorm. We have enough to fix." He said, explaining how he would present his argument.
"Actually I'm surprised anyone would bother to taze anyone when we all have weapons or why they would taze you. Don't you hold some authority around here?"
Speaking of, why was he hiding in the hallway asking him to get him things. "Why do you even need a welder? You don't seem the type to do that kind of labor in your free time, and if it was for official purposes you could have just filed a request." Which meant it probably wasn't.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 10:05 am
Mark was thinking of a lot of things. He was thinking about the failed pizza hotpockets he had last night. Which lead him to search for virginia hot- wait no, better not think about that. Think about his box of cool ranch Doritos he bought instead, those were great. And didn't have those weird experimental vitamins. Speaking of Deus vitami-
- "Huh?" There was a lapse in silence between Melvin's tirade where Mark had thought he had finished talking, only to hear the other begin with an 'Actually'. He stared. "Bro, the runic taser thing is for your own good. Yeah I mean if everyone had one just think of all the people who would check them out without uh, reading the safety instructions on it. Yeah what a huge shame."
Upon hearing the topic of authority the Death assistant just sighed. Deeply. "it is a burden I have to bear, the burden of being too handsome. Sometimes people steal looks at me but no, I must push them away," wait, was Mark even talking about himself?! ," and do important stuff like I dunno. Not tell people anything really critically important. And attempt to change my e-mail password for the hundreth time."
He paused. "Actually, you staying dead is great. Since you're no longer officially registered, it means any equipment you check out will be considered off the record. I'm gonna bid on your coat tomorrow, that's okay right?" Off the record was a fancy way of saying illegal.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 11:05 am
Melvin stared tab Mark a moment. Wow, he sure was delusional to think what he had going on might be handsome.
"Glad you are looking out for me then." He said though doubted it considering Melvin hadn't been tazzed once. Something felt like a story about who Mark was messing with.
"And you don't think that once I become alive again means they won't ask me where a welder is?" He asked. "...but maybe I'all go okay fetch." Maybe. It so happened Melvin didn't get a chance to talk to too many people and having even an awkward chat was still some form of human contact that wasn't yelling at his ex or his family in Twitter. And if anyone asked why he too equipment, he could just get it back from him since he knew where it would be.
"And you can bid and win all you want on this coat." Which was technically his and Rin's sewn together. "I just don't know how you are getting my coat off of my dead body." And why his coat of all things? "Didn't know of all things you wanted to undress a guy."
He leaned back again, turning his head just a few millimeters. "I might buy the handsome bit if it wasn't hidden under all of that mess. When was the last time you cleaned up?" At least he wasn't very old and not a sharp, boney figure like Lawr.
Damn my standards bar is low nowadays.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 1:31 pm
"Well, you could call me a collector of the odd and curious." This was supposed to be some sort of Avengers ref. "Also nobody else in Life will let me uh, borrow their coats so you'll have to do."
The sound of sudden footsteps alerted Mark who jumped about ten feet. "Yeah cool anyway bring the stuff I'll meet you in my lair."
He sprinted away despite not specifying anything of what he wanted or explaining if Melvin was actually going to get paid. A second later a Life Hunter, holding two runic tasers paused, took a few desperate gulps of air, and then resumed the chase after the Death assistant.
Mark would indeed be waiting in his notorious lair, which was actually pretty common knowledge if Melvin had to ask for directions. The room was incredibly dark save sparks of extremely bright light as the Death Assistant welded as carefully as he could a new handle for his working lightsaber.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:37 pm
Melvin shot back, pressing himself against the wall as the tech rushed by, welding two tasers like they were daggers and waiting to drive them home. It became very clear why the tasers were being employed, and he guessed he didn't get the office-wide memo to be armed to take care of Mark if he should show up in the labs. Considering the relationship between Life and Death, t was probably a act of treason to even speak to the man.
It wasn't hard to get the equipment as he could go into most any lab and pick out machinery and tools that might require runic maintenance or various tweaks added to them. A welder was a strange request, but he carried in in one arm by the case, the various cables along with it. The Mars bars, just for the hell of it, he just took from the vending machines. He knew better to mess with a tech on the edge and their one guilty pleasure that might keep them from snapping and tossing a half-shaved minipet at your face.
The Lair was not a place he had ever been as he didn't go into the Death department unless to run an errand or retrieve equipment. His jacket stood out of place among the rest, but he was soon pointed into the right direction.
At first he felt the man was out of his office when he saw the lights were out, but the sparks of light made him think of a monitor flicking. It wasn't until he stepped into the doorway that he saw he was actually welding a -
"Oh you have got to be kidding me." He whispered, stepping inside slowly. While it was idiotic what he was welding, he wasn't about to let the man get burn marks from getting startled. Instead, he just waited and watched.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:39 pm
It took about five more minutes for him to finish, propping his tinted goggles over on top of his normal goggles. His entire face was covered in some strange coloured soot save the glasses part and he turned off his setup, placing everything into the top of what could only be explained as a pile of junk more impressive than the washed up heaps of electronics Hunters kept on finding along the shore, with about a thousand times less soap.
"Cool, you got the stuff." Mark set the work in progress lightsaber very carefully down. "I was watching some tutorials on youtube, did you know there's a dude who makes custom lightsabers for like 1200 each? That means I could charge like five times that on the island. Wanna see it in action?"
He waddled through piles and piles of computers in various stages of assembly and pulled out a surprisingly well-rolled wad of $500. "Here you go, just put the stuff over there." It wasn't exactly clear what 'there' was. "So like, let me break this down for you, buddy." They weren't really buddy status yet, "You're alive, you get paid monthly to your account, but your stuff doesn't get sold, no, don't explain to me why, I really don't wanna know. You're dead, you probably don't have to go on any missions, but no monthly pay and no full Hunter access, well I mean I could get you a way in but you'd owe me even more than whatever it is you have."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:56 pm
Melvin waited, and waited, and decided he would just lean on the door frame a moment as Mark focused on his task. If the man could clear or add onto your record, he didn't want to clear his voice and make him trip up on something he seemed to care a lot about at the moment. While he hadn't seen Mark's wrath, he felt it would possibly be a spiteful one. If he was dead now, he probably would be a dead criminal who was responsible for starting several disasters if he upset him too much.
When the lights flickered on, Melvin eyelids rose as he stared at what looked like an earthquake had tossed everything off his shelves and then the shelves with it. There were computer parts and equipment everywhere and he couldn't scarcely make out the floor. Looking down to where it petered out to the door, he held the equipment a bit more closely. Put it....where?
"Mark....you're office.......what happened?" And why hadn't be bothered getting everything back to where it belonged. Already his mind was sorting. Papers could go there. Open folders that had spilled open could be filled again. The parts that matched could all be placed against a wall atop each other until some sort of bin could be designated. Just - there was so much!
It was hard to focus on what Mark and he gave him a few nods as he continues to look all around the room. "That....sounds pretty crazy for ...for that. "
See it? "Y-yeah. Sure. Mm-hmm." Dear god why was that chair knocked over and boxes set between it's legs. Why would anyone think that made sense. It would at least make more sense to have junked piled up when it was standing upright but that didn't even work!
Turning back at buddy, he pressed his lips thin, still overtaken by the room that felt like it was expanding and filling up the room around him. Moving slowly, he tried to find a desk and instead took a box off the chair and turned the chair upright before setting the things on the seat....and then moved to pick up the box and look around for a place to put that.
"O...okay. And if I'm dead...then I can't pay you back for that access. So dead means I can't do anything at all. So....being alive is the only option I guess?" He moved to the wall and picked up a monitor to place the box down and then held the monitor to find where that should go. Did he have a desk?
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 6:55 pm
There was indeed one glowing desk in the center of the room that seemed like the cortex of the entire infrastructure, almost every significant wire criss-crossing and eventually merging into the centerpiece.
Mark looked puzzled. "If you mean from that weird earthquake disaster thing we had, I cleaned up already." No, it was just always like this, the earthquake had actually jostled things into a more clean state that eventually became erratic again, in the furthest point of entropy.
He tossed the more used welder and the very suspiciously generous five-hundred to Melvin. "Here you go, you can return that piece too. It's in need of uh, repairs and stuff, I mean that's what trainee lab techs do these days to learn right? Make them go fish for some more runes, god knows I've seen a lifetimes supply of mermaids."
While Melvin internalized the entire debate of whether or not he was dead or alive - a surprisingly common choice among Hunters that had nothing to do with their division - Mark plopped into some sort of chair hidden entirely by the junkpile mess presumably within range of the main computer. He typed about two single lines into it and hit enter, swiveling his still hidden chair back to face Melvin. "Cool, done. Let me know if you want anything else, you know where to find me." He paused. "So about your STD..."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 7:20 pm
"You...cleaned up already." And he looked around the room in one wide circle and looked back at Mark. "This?"
This was not clean. This was not good. He could only imagine what amount of dirt was all around and Mark just walking around it was just making it worse by bring dirt into the room to hide into every nook and crevice. There needed to be shelves and stacks of things and just some IDEA OF WHERE THE FLOOR WAS!
Taking deep breathes, he moved towards the desk to maybe place the monitor there for some sort of use and see if he could just - collect all the monitors there. If he had the monitors there, maybe if he brought the keyboards he saw poking around to the center, then the base could just be the basic computer parts while the larger equipment could find it's own designated wall. The paperwork wouldn't fit on the desk so it would just need to be collected in one area that would be designated as clerical work that would then need to be sorted from there. How had no one asked for paperwork when he saw so much and yet it wasn't even in any sort of specified piles!
As he tried to push through the ground to place the monitor, Mark somehow finding a chair to work (He WORKED here without being bothered by it?!,) he brought up 3 letters he did NOT EVER WANT TO HEAR MARK SAY!
What little balance he had in the piles was lost and he tripped over himself and into the fowl peaks of Mt. Doom. As if he had fallen into a nest of rats, Melvin bolted upright, looking at his now empty hands and trying to see where he had dropped the monitor before looking at Mark and then DEFINITELY NOT WANTING TO LOOK AT MARK, now a splotch of reds as he looked around.
"No. We don't need to talk about that. That's...that's with them." And he vaguely pointed to the door where down many halls the breeding department had their own files and research they were doing on him. It was hard enough going into that place and get tested in those ways, but to have someone he wasn't even remotely close to just casually bring it up was not a discussion he was prepared for. He didn't even really discuss it with anyone he knew even remotely well as far as a warning.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 7:51 pm
Melvin, like the many before him, too was no match for the tenured experience of the junk heap. At some point Mark had given up yelling at people for trying to clean it because it just could not be done - and also because it was kind of difficult to clean something when the Death assistant backseat commented on their daily behaviours.
"That's with... them?" From Mark's angle, it looked like Melvin was pointing directly at the Sun training quarters. He pinched his nose, trying not to think too hard on it. "You know what, it's cool, you do you. Just wear really, really, really strong protection." Wait, was Simon involved in this too?
Mark, the last person in the world who should actually be giving advice on safe sex. He casually retrieved the Mars bar from the conglomerate pile and internally considered what it would be like if Deus was populated in the future by generations of mindless Life Hunter minions. It was kind of sad. Like Melvin's life. Poor Melvin, sure Mark and him would never get along well, but it didn't mean he had to like him.
In a fit of determination, Mark stood up. "You know what, good on you for admitting to it. Admitting is the first step of solving a problem. The good news is I am a philanthropist, and we, together, are going to help you fix this - this everything."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:20 pm
Melvin wasn't exactly giving up on the pile just yet, but his mind was having a hard time trying to focus on the massive task of somehow organizing the office into something more livable and the fact that Mark wanted to know about a STD he got from his ex in a fit of hate-desperation to keep him. This was not the time, the place, and differently not the person he needed to talk to about. There were too many questions the life techs asked him about those sort of intimacies that were mortifying enough that standing in a garbage pile only somehow made it more difficult to endure.
"Of course but protection isn't - " And he stopped, closing his eyes a moment and holding his hands up. Nope. He wasn't going to have this talk about how his STD worked with Mark. If the guy was already snooping in his files to bring it up in the first place, then he didn't need him. Actually WHY did he decide to bring that up? Was it just there in red on the first page of his file?!
If that was the case, there was no Supreme Runic Master status that would repair that one detail, and he felt his insides sink to think that any and all of his superiors (or anyone with Mark's level of access to personal files) would see that plastered everywhere.
As the chair creaked as Mark stood, Melvin stopped in mid-reach of grabbing a hard drive setting atop a bunch of cables. "This everything?" Did - he mean fix up the room?
"Wait really?" The thought brought such a wave of relief and general excitement akin to the time he was left 53B for the evening to clean and reorganize all the glassware, but as he stared back, he got the sinking suspicious that everything with the word philanthropist did not work with housekeeping,
Slowly, he brought the harddrive a little closer to him. "We're not talking about cleaning your office, are we?"
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:33 pm
Mark blinked. It was tempting really, to have Melvin sink into the pits of despair trying to clean the office but it would also accomplish nothing. "No no, I'm donating my day to you, as a sign of my uh, kindness. Now let's march out together and give those people whom you shared the STD with a piece of your mind!"
It was loud enough that Oz, an aforementioned Death Hunter standing at the doorway waiting on Mark yet again, just stood there. And in a rare moment of feeling smiled. And took out his phone.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:50 pm
Alright. The office had to wait.
"Mark - I.." He stopped as his shoe caught on a nest of cables and he knelt down to try and untie himself from them. "-That's...awfully nice of you and everything but...how do you...those people aren't exactly....um......someone I want to talk - ." He grumbled as he tugged up and over and then just started to shake the mass of wires before he could free his shoe. Just as he stood, he noticed the man at the door just smiling at him with his phone out, and noticed that Mark's door was open since Melvin first came here.
Quickly, he stumbled over all manner of parts and wiring till he managed to get near enough to Mark to gesture for him to PLEASE keep it down. "Can you not shout that around." He whispered quickly as he glanced to the door and then back. "You're division likes to listen in." He said through clenched teeth. If the piles of garbage wasn't so filthy, they might be a nice place to hide.
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