Unlock Secrets(open)

[Lani Hunter]

Lani wasn't one to do something out in the open like this. But if he came back at night something was bound to happen. The security here was tight, tighter than a school's should be in his opinion. He was dressed neatly with well fitted jeans and a collared shirt his short hair was falling in place very well and he wore a smile that he practiced in the mirror that didn't have his impish curse attached to it. That would never work. He had planned this very well playing it out in his head. In reality he probably didn't have to do this but he was being paid for his information, might as well do his best to get Eva good information. He still felt guilty about stealing Dalton's information but, Lani was a messenger all that mattered was the message. He needed to pull away from these emotional ties. They were going to be the end of them.

"Good afternoon," he smiled sweetly at the receptionist who obviously was more concerned with trying to get home for the day than pay too much attention to him. Perfect. He chose a random name of someone who's office he knew was in the direction of the files. Dalton was bound to have something in there. The woman waved him on and he sauntered down the hallway looking at the doors and reading the signs as if looking for an office. He went all the way up then back down as if lost of maybe even a little nervous, like this meeting was going to determine his future. Lani in actuality was checking to make sure the coast was clear. He glanced up ever so innocently at a camera and turned it ever so slightly away from the door keeping his back to it at all times and avoiding the lens. With one pass by Lani unlocked the door with his power and in the next he was inside and locking the door.

Not a sound made not a mite of dust stirred. He still had it. He smiled that impish smile that had I'm going to get away with it written all over it. He let his eyes adjust to the dim light and checked for cameras inside, none. Wonderful. He walked leisurely through the stacks of file cabinets and old file systems. Now a lot of stuff would be on computers but there was always a back up paper file. Lani tapped his chin and turned down one corner and found the cabinets labeled former students. He opened it just curious if Dalton had attended this facility. Not very likely considering his accent but worth a shot. Nothing. Staff next then. He pulled open the file and skimmed through it. Nothing about his past family or any sister but that wasn't usually something they asked at interviews. There was some about his interview, apparently there had been no question, Dalton was going to teach here. He sighed and snapped it shut at the same moment he thought he heard a noise from the door. He waited a moment slowly moving into a crouch.

He edged back and drew a breath, it was nothing. He sighed and replaced the file, it had nothing particularly interesting, just stuff he already knew or less than what he already knew. Eva would just have to deal. Lani started back toward the door when curiosity snagged his brain. He looked around for the student files. Here in the corner opposite the staff was the student G-H files. He grinned and pulled it open and snagged the one labeled Hunter, Lani K. He smiled and pop it open on the top of the cabinet. Well there was the whole incident the day his power came. He frowned as he looked at the police report and the pulled new story. Hammel apparently filed an appeal and Lani almost didn't get it. He bit his lip. Maybe he had been too harsh. Then there was his family and his health records and thankfully nothing about his other life.

Lani's head snapped up and he dropped to the ground. He was sure he had heard the door that time. He crouched and slid back into the shadows bonding with them and becoming almost invisible. He glanced up at the folder. He thought swear after swear and slowly watched the person as he hid and slid the file ever so slowly to a point where he could close it. Now only the matter of putting it back. He decided to wait and see if the person would leave. Please leave.

[Ezekiel Benedict]

Ezekiel mused the workings of Hammel as he patrolled the corridors. Viewed objectively, while the ability to take children from their parents was essential to policing young meta-humans. However, research showed that snatching children from their parents could have devastating effects in a developmental sense. An interesting dilemma.

A small voice in his ear pulled him from his reverie. "We have a camera movement in your area, Ezekiel. Could just be a slipping fixture, it was only fractional. You may want to take a wander over, it's camera 62."

After only a minute or so, Ezekiel had arrived at Camera 62. He peered at it closely, trying to determine if it had been moved or simply slipped. As much as Hammel security was serious, a school of it's nature still could only dedicate so much to security technology, and so the wall mounts for the cameras were not particularly durable. Ezekiel had tried to stress the importance of solid mounts, rather than swivelling, but apparently the cost outweighed what the budgeting department saw the benefits being.

"This is Ezekiel. Camera shows no outward sign of tampering, can you confirm that the feed is clear?" A small squelch in his earpiece confirmed that the feed was not broken in any way. Maybe it had just slipped. Then again, maybe it hadn't. The doors on this corridor would most likely all be locked at this time, it would only take a minute to check them.

The first few did not yield to him, but then he felt the door start to open. He hesitated. His natural instinct - a product of his training - to burst straight in would probably not go down too well if someone had simply stayed behind for a while. Gripping the handle tighter, he slowly pushed the door open.

The office was shrouded in shadow. Usually Ezekiel would immediately move out of the doorway, so as to take away his silhouette from the 'killing zone', but he hardly felt that was necessary here. If you started acting like everything was a drama, life soon became one never ending set of crises. Instead, he purposefully allowed his considerable frame to be outlined.

"Anyone in here at all? This is Hammel security."

[Lani Hunter]

Lani barely had time to reflect on his error when the door opened. What had gone wrong? If he hadn’t been afraid of making ever so slight a noise he would have hit himself in the forehead. The door! That was the easiest and most typical thing. Not locking it gave it away so much. But how had they thought to check the door. He hadn’t left it ajar. The camera was off the door. What had gone wrong? Lani glanced around the cabinets. While the shadows gave him a considerable amount of cover it also gave the other person the same. He peered out his eyes widening at the silhouette. There was nothing to be said about a shadow making someone look more impressive but at this angle the man looked huge and would probably find it an easy feat to break Lani in half.

Perhaps it was just a teacher or some other curious soul. They would leave soon and Lani could get the hell outta here. Alas luck seems to have not only abandoned Lani but ran screaming from him. Hammel Security, well of course it was, Lani knew better than to hope for anything better. Now was the moment of truth, try to get out with the possibility of getting caught later was option one. Option two: Lay in wait silent and get caught when the person decided he wanted to search the room more thoroughly. Option three: Give yourself up, your kind of doomed anyways. No he didn’t like that one. Option four: Lay in wait and pretend to have no clue about anything that had happened. Either way Lani could only think of option one as him having any chance of getting out without a ton of trouble raining down on him.

The last option certainly wouldn’t work. Lani had a reputation and feinting ignorance would do nothing but keep him in the security office longer until he confessed what he was up to. Which would never happen. Lani was very good at lying but then they had mind readers. What a bother. Well option one it was then. He watched the man and waited a moment to see if he would leave, when that didn’t appear to be likely, as any good security dog one always checked just in case. Lani closed his eyes and felt across the room for one of the cabinets and pulled one of the drawers making just enough noise to make like someone trying to be quiet and doing a poor job at it. Now the man would go in that direction and Lani could crawl the rest of the way to the door. Lani moved silently into a crouch popping his collar up a little to give his face a little bit of shelter. He glanced up. Oh shoot! The file! Well he had a way to fix that. The man just needed to move out of the doorway now…

[Ezekiel Benedict]

A sound off to his left made Ezekiel turn. Staring into the darkness, he tried to make out if anyone was over there. A few seconds passed. If there was anybody in here, then they certainly didn't seem in any great hurry to reveal themselves, and Ezekiel knew better than to go wandering into an unsecured room, let alone one as shadowy as this was.

Feeling around on the wall to his right while not taking his eyes off of what lay in front of him, Ezekiel groped for the light switch. Finding it, he flicked it slowly on. The light illuminated for only a nanosecond, and then fizzled lamely out. Blown bulb, thought Ezekiel, naturally it would happen right at this second; he hadn't even been able to see anything in the room.

Ezekiel calmly, emotionlessly weighed up the situation in his brain. Either this was some silly student prank, maybe even a dare to break into one of the offices, and therefore completely harmless, or it could have been something more sinister, more dangerous. In some of the recent security briefs he had detected increasingly troubled undertones. Rumours about people being assaulted had spread like wildfire through the ranks.

In just a few moments, he had made up his mind. The room was windowless, and this door was the only way in or out. If there was somebody in there, then they would be trying to leave by this route. If not...well then, a carpenter was a small price to pay from his wages to fit a new door.

Ezekiel took a few steps backwards, closing the door behind him. Taking a few well-practised deep breaths, he relaxed his body, and focused his mind.

He concentrated on an atom in the door frame, where the lock bolt would normally slide into. Slowly, gently, he increased it's mass, to the point where the atoms in the wood around it began to quiver ever so slightly as the gravitational pull of the atom took hold of them. At the same time, he decreased the mass of the atoms in the metal lock.

Slightly more, and it inexorably began to slide across. The wood of the door and door frame began to creak in protest, but their resistance was a lot greater than that of a single, inch-long piece of metal that was designed to slide into the area of the atom he was manipulating.

As the metal bolt neared the 'locked' position, he steeled himself. Forcing a material to collapse or fuse with another was always the trickiest part, as it required immense force, but only for a fraction of a second, lest the rest of the material around it fall in as well. It was basically like chucking a big metal weight onto one end of a see-saw, and taking one off of the other end. He'd always found it easier to think of it as more like a little...flick.

The immediate space around the door handle shuddered for an instant, then fell still again. Ezekiel admired his handiwork. The lock, unable to resist the pull of the atom, had half buried it's way into the wood, and half collapsed, as if a black hole had seized it for a second and pulled it in. Or like a mouse trying to fit into a really small hole, he mused. Basically, it wasn't moving.

He tried the door. Definitely a bit more locked now.

If he had been able to feel smugness, Ezekiel would have grinned. The person who may have been inside - Ezekiel was beginning more and more to suspect his student dare hypothesis was correct - could be released, but only through a reversal of the atomic mass manipulation. Admittedly, it would be a lot more messy when he had to wrench the metal from its fused state with the wood, but it was that or cut the door frame off to free the door.

Ezekiel sighed as nothing happened for half a minute or so. He wasn't an unkind man, and he guessed that if it was a student performing a dare, they had most likely only done it out of peer pressure. At least, that's what he liked to think.

"Come on mate, I've got a deal for you. If you come out now then you can just scoot off back to your buddies and tell them that you passed the dare or initiation ritual or whatever this is. No harm's been done, we'll just forget about this little incident. I want to get back to the office and have a nice coffee, you want to get out of here and do homework, or whatever it is you do with your spare time. Sound like a plan? Just come and knock on the door and I'll get it open for you."

[Lani Hunter]

Lani watch the man carefully and as soon as the man turned he took the opportunity to snatch the file off the top of the filing cabinet and slipped out of sight before he was spotted. He glanced around the corner in the shadows glad for the cover of the dim light that existed in the room. He watched the man just waiting, crouched and ready. But he didn’t move… why not? Lani ground his teeth in frustration and sat back curling into the corner clutching the folder waiting for something to happen. He bit back a sigh that would make noise. There had to be another way out of here. He glanced around, no windows, no other doors. Just the one this guy was parked in front of. Lani could have screamed, this was starting to be the worst day of his entire life.

He glanced down at the file that hung open. This was all a waste and he was about to get into major trouble. The hopelessness was something Lani didn’t really experience when he was in the zone like this. He needed to learn what he did wrong. He glanced down at the file and his brow furled. He had thought he had given it a good once over but he had missed something. In light pencil there was a circle on the page. He frowned and took the paper. It was the newspaper clipping he had seen before but he missed the writing. There was a question mark and a note by it questioning if Lani was the one they were looking for. Then on the back… someone was looking into his past. And someone was getting way to close. Lani glanced up as he heard rustling from the door. Maybe he was leaving? Apparently not, the shadow was very stationary. He ducked back into cover as the light flickered on and sat still as a stone. He was sure that for a moment his heart stopped beating.

He drew a slow breath as the light went out again leaving them in darkness. The other light that had been kept on giving the shadows a little light also went out. Lani wondered for a moment if that was what the man’s power was. Lani sat for a while counting the seconds and waiting for his eyes to adjust. It would have been easier if this wasn’t a completely internal room. The lights being all out made it like a wall had surrounded him. Now Lani wasn’t claustrophobic but he was terrified of being trapped. When he though he heard the lock shoot home he panicked. His mind could only think that he was trapped, locked away for everyone to forget about. He knew it was stupid but he pulled at the lock with his power. It was stuck. Damn. He would have been throwing curses at everything had he not been trained so carefully.

Lani stayed still and quiet for what felt like an eternity and nothing changed. The man didn’t move and the door didn’t change. He closed his eyes and pulled at the lock. The door started to shake and the handle jolt. A long list of swears ran through his mind. Why wasn’t it moving?! He nearly growled in frustration and finally calmed down enough to think clearly. When the feeling of being trapped ran through him nothing else matter than getting out. Lani perked his ears as the man spoke. That was interesting. A deal. A glimmer of hope in the doom. Yes luck had returned to his hand. He smiled glad for the deal. The skeptic in him told him to be wary but the desperate trapped Lani would do anything to get out of this situation. He stood slowly slipping the critical piece of information from his folder and slipping it back into the drawer. Without these notes and such there would be such a setback hopefully no one would think of it again.

He folded it up and put it in his back pocket and slowly moved toward the door. He stopped just short a silhouette watching a silhouette. He stood a little ways off out of reach, he hoped, and just stared at the man. The skeptic finally caught up with him. Well it was too late now, the man knew he was here and wasn’t going to let him leave. He carefully reached out, preparing an attack just in case, and knocked lightly on the door.

[Ezekiel Benedict]

The light, almost hesitant knock on the door came as no surprise to Ezekiel. Through the panel of frosted glass he could see the outline of the intruder come and stand the other side of the door.

Well, a deal was a deal.

Ezekiel focussed on the door again, but this time it was the hinges that he worked on. The door frame was made more massive, and the centre of the hinge attached the the door itself equally so. Ezekiel could feel the strain of the rest of the hinge, attracted to the both the door and the frame.

For a fraction of a second, the hinges were suddenly of very little mass. With a horrendous snapping sound, they tore themselves apart as the two masses pulled them each way. The door was now only attached by the fused lock, which Ezekiel forced out of the door and completely into the wall with a cursory flick.

It would be fantastic to be able to say that the door dramatically dropped to the floor in a cloud of dust from which Ezekiel stepped into view. Unfortunately, Ezekiel had to carefully lower the door to the ground to avoid the glass smashing everywhere. Looking up, he saw the intruder for the first time. That was interesting.

"Mr Hunter, I did not see you in this office. Now, the place you were looking for is somewhere approximately out of my sight, I expect. Have a nice day, and please refrain from interfering with our cameras in future.

Ezekiel turned on his heel, paused to prop the door up against the wall, and stalked off.

[Lani Hunter]

Lani took a reflexive step back at the noise and shaking of the door. He didn't want to be anywhere near it if the man decided to back out on his deal. He wondered with amazement as the door literally became unhinged and almost fell to the floor. What on earth was this guy's power? Not even Lani could pull a door off its hinges. He could certainly try and probably succeed but only through clever little tricks, not the whole thing coming off at once. He blinked in the light and had for a moment the thought of hiding his face. But he didn't want to rain anymore hardship on himself for the time being.

He didn't smile, didn't show any emotion when he was identified. This could end badly but the continued, 'I didn't see you here,' was enough to win Lani's trust. He stepped out of the office carefully pulling his shirt over his back pocket. Lani nodded, "Yes sir." Then paused at the comment about the camera and shot him a confused but knowing look. The man picked up the door, not a person without a lot of strength, Lani certainly wasn't imagining things when he thought the man could snap him in half. "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about." Tossing an innocent smile over his shoulder he turned and walked in the opposite direction of the security office taking the long way around the office to the front doors. Once clear he pulled out the paper and grinned, at least something had come of this day. This was indeed interesting, first figure out how much they knew then destroy the evidence. He stuffed it back in his pocket and continued on with his day as if nothing had happened.