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A violent knocking on my door means one of two things: someone’s mad at me, or it’s time for battle. And I know for a fact I didn’t sleep through the entire weekend break.
I don’t particularly care to rush myself after being rudely woken up by one of my teammates, so I take my sweet time dressing out of my cute kitty onesie and into my usual, more workplace-appropriate puppy sweater (with matching pants!). The knocking at my door doesn’t get any quieter. Neither does the sudden yelling that I can immediately tell is from none other than Scout. I can’t say I didn’t immediately suspect it was him.
He nearly grabs me by the neck once I finally open the door, screaming in my face “Did you do it?!”
Uh. Probably not, but I really don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I tell him this with a furrowed brow. Wait. Nevermind, he can’t see my face.
“Huh—? Don’t play dumb with me, punkass.” He shoves me out of the way and starts rummaging through my drawing desk like a maniac. When he doesn't find whatever he's looking for, he jumps back in front of me with the most pathetic scowl I think I have ever seen on his face. "Where's my comics, man?!"
I still don't know what he's talking about. I smack him across the face and tell him very clearly: Calm your ass down and tell me what's up.
It takes him a second to figure out what I just said, either from the muffle of my mask or the whiplash he got from being smacked. "...So you didn't take my whole Sire Uranium collection?"
What? Heck no! That crap is for dorks-- er... it's not something I'm into. Hopefully I can get that message across with my mumbling.
Scout looks at me like he got caught with his hand in the Sandvich box. "Oh..."
Yeah. Pretty awkward for him, I assume.
"Uh. Sorry 'bout that."
Good. Thank you.
Idiot...
...
"...Soooo... you wouldn't happen to know who took 'em, would'ja?"
Nope. Not a clue. But I could help him find them if he wants.
Scout cracks his knuckles. "Alright! Let's get to work."
Wait—
He doesn’t waste a second in grabbing my shoulder.
The TV in Scout's room is turned up to an utterly outrageous volume. Damn near brain-scattering, which doesn't help the headache I got from slamming my head in the doorframe while Scout was dragging me in.
I really hope he can at least feel the scowl I’m shooting at him from beneath my mask.
Whatever. Off to the scene of the crime. Scout’s bookshelf (more like comicshelf). A whole section is completely empty, exposing the scuffed paint on the wood. Unfortunate.
There’s a bit of black powder smeared on the edge. It’s probably nothing, but it catches my eye anyways. And like the ear-blaring detective show in the background, “we gotta tie up every loose end”. Or something like that. I really can’t think with the volume up so high.
Go turn that damn thing down, I tell Scout. He complies. Finally. Now I can hear myself think.
…I’m not really sure what else to think about, though. Uh. There’s nothing else that seems to be out of place.
At least until Scout shouts in my ear: “whoever did it broke my Tom Jones figure, too!”
Huh?
On the section next to where Scout’s comics were is just what he described. A figurine of Tom Jones. The head seems to have come off and been haphazardly superglued back on.
“They didn’t even glue it back on right!” He takes the figure and examines it like a piece of fine china. “The head doesn’t even face that direction.”
Ah. I assumed the sloppy glue job was Scout’s own handiwork, considering the mess. Interesting. So that’s a clue, I suppose.
While he’s focused on that little figure, I begin to take a look around the shelf itself. I can see the remnants of a substantially large boot print, larger than Scout’s. Another clue.
I don’t have a lot, so far, but based on this evidence alone I can make a few assumptions. Our thief wears large boots and is somewhat careless. That narrows it down…
Uh. None. There are only three other people in the building besides Scout and me. Demo, Spy, and Sniper. They could all fit that description, assuming Spy used his disguise kit or something. I don’t particularly trust any of them, either.
Still, only three suspects. That’s not too bad. We’ll start off easy and choose to interrogate Sniper.
But where is Sniper? I ask.
“He’s at the tennis court. Probably chucking softballs at the ceiling, or somethin’,” Scout explains. “Saw him earlier on my way to your room.”
Alright. We can get this poorly-written show on the road! I can finally put my deerstalker to use, and slide it onto my masked head.
Scout squints at me. “Where the hell did that come from?”
That’s none of your damn business, Sam. I mean Scout
I knew Sniper wouldn’t say anything of value (unless it would incriminate someone he was annoyed with, like Spy), but I like to check all my bases. The smallest detail matters, and if I hit the birdie high enough, I’ll win that information. With one tough sweep of my arm, the shuttle is sent flying upwards. Higher than either of us initially expected.
Hah! And the Administrator said air blast tennis was a waste of my time.
Sniper cranes his head and nearly falls as he stumbles backwards. The uncoordinated twist of his arm to bat the birdie away tells me he didn’t see that one coming.
My eyes flick down to his stance for a moment, gaze falling on a small, bright orange triangle shape peaking out of his pocket. A pocket that was hidden until his shirt rode up on him. When he swats the shuttle, his arm falls low again and the shape disappears, but I don’t falter for a second.
Prepare. Raise. Swat. That birdie is out of his reach within seconds.
I've won my information. Naturally. Without any effort, really.
Sniper looks back and forth between me and the shuttle. I don't know if it's amazement or fury in his eyes.
"...Crikey..."
He puts his racket back down and takes a seat on the bench. "Right. You've got questions?"
Oh boy, do I! My notepad is in my hand before he even finishes sitting down.
First of all, where were you last night? What were you doing? Can anyone attest to it? Did you see any suspicious activity from anyone? Why did—
“Slow down there, miss.” Sniper chuckles at me. I don’t particularly care for it. “Went out to the road to phone my parents. ‘Fraid they can’t give a testimonial, though. Outta town for the week.”
Hm. That’s a problem for both of us. No alibi. The only thing giving me any hope is the orange object I pocketed from Sniper while I was distracting him with my barrage of questions. A superglue tube.
Sniper notices my disappointment. “If it makes y’ feel any better, Demo was acting pretty strange this morning. Almost like he was dying to keep his mouth shut.”
I knew it! Sniper would only ever say something to lead me onto someone else’s back. But whatever. Information is information. Demo is next.
Sniper wasn’t kidding. Demoman is… looking pretty suspicious. Sweaty, pale in the face, wide-eyed, and generally just more sluggish than he usually is while hammered.
He’s leaning against some barrels for support, but still manages to fall face-first into the gravel. Scout and I help him up.
“Jeezus, man, how many have ya had—“
Scout immediately shuts up when Demo immediately starts spewing all over the dirt. Uh. Ew.
Scout flinches away.
I manage to catch Demo before he can fall again. Poor guy. He doesn’t look as shifty now that I’m thinking about it. Just sick. Maybe he had some bad liquor. If that’s even possible. He looks way too unwell to be able to pull off a heist of this level.
Scout and I lead Demo inside to his room and lay him down. We also fetch him some aspirin and a glass of water to keep him alive. Or at least twitching and drooling unnervingly. He puts a shaky, sweaty hand on my shoulder.
At first I’m worried he’s about to hurl all over me, but thankfully that doesn’t happen. “O-o-oh, yer a pal, lad-sie.” He says a few other things I can’t quite make out, and when he tries to roll out of bed we keep him in place. He gets the message.
“…A better pal than that backstabber, ah tell ya. That bloody Spy, goin’ through my bloody bottles...”
Hm. Trouble with Spy stealing his drinks, it seems. Scout’s already ten steps ahead of me in search of the new suspect before we’ve even finished talking to Demo. Literally. I can’t keep up with his horse-like legs.
Not many people are allowed into Spy’s dungeon. At least I call it a dungeon. It’s dark and cold and smells like tobacco. Though, it does lack the bloodstains, but only if those wine bottles actually contain wine.
Today I decided to break in unannounced. This probably does not help my case, but I’d rather be direct with the pretentious frenchie. So before he can even start complaining, I’m right in his face, pinning him to his fancy-schmancy chair with a boot. Got anything to hide, knife man?
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Hmm. Well, a little drunken birdie tells me you know something about who stole Scout’s comic book collection. The one about the radioactive guy, or something.
Spy scoffs at me, as always. He puts a cigarette in his mouth and flicks his lighter open a few times. It sparks, but no flame. Pathetic. “I wouldn’t bother going near that kind of… juvenile literature.”
Damn, that’s fair. Despite his anger, Scout seems to understand. What motive would Spy have for that?
His clearly-empty lighter is starting to piss me off, so I take it from him. He glares at me.
“...Tell me, arsonist.” He stands up and stretches his shoulders. “Am I your only suspect?”
Scout and I shake our heads. “Nah. We got Sniper.”
But he told us he was out calling his parents the night of the heist. So he has a possible alibi.
Spy raises an eyebrow, clearly in deep thought. I don’t like when he thinks so hard. He holds out a hand in front of me while taking the cigarette out of his mouth. I produce my own constantly-fueled lighter.
“I suggest you talk to the bushman again. His explanation is flawed.” Spy takes my lighter and holds it to his cigarette. “His parents are dead.”
Spy can’t see my eyes— nobody can. But he notices the mild annoyance burning behind them. That bastard lied to me! I leave as quickly as possible to find Sniper again. Scout catches up closely behind.
“His dad is dead, too?!”
Sniper doesn’t look all too happy to see me again, given he’s in the middle of cleaning his funny hat, but that’s too damn bad. He lied to me and now he has to suffer the consequences.
I crack my knuckles and stare directly into his beady little eyes. How could you have lied to me, I tell him. Your parents are dead. You couldn’t have been calling them!
He looks at me like a kid with his hand caught in the match drawer. He glances over to an equally-pissed Scout. Caught him in his little scheme.
“...Right. You got me. I wasn’t calling my parents.”
Scout claps his hands together and points directly at Sniper’s nose. “So you don’t have an alibi—”
“I was calling a girl.”
A… girl?
“A girl?”
Sniper nods. “Yes. A girl. A lady. If you want, I can give you ‘er number.” He takes the notepad out of my pocket. “She can verify.”
Well… I don’t really know what to say. It sounds slightly improbable to me, for multiple different reasons, but honestly, I don’t want to find out. Imagining Sniper dating has ruined my appetite. I take my notepad away from him.
He snickers. Scout and I look at each other, confused. Dumbfounded. We’re no closer to the answer of who stole the comics than we were earlier. I turn to Sniper again, though I’m not really sure why.
“...What? You want a clue, or something?”
Yes. Anything will help.
“Ask Spy why he was spikin’ the liquor in Demo’s bottles.”
Alright! That’s a— wait, he what?
I’m back in Spy’s chamber in the blink of an eye, with one of Demo’s oily scrumpy bottles in hand. Scout actually got there before me and is now hounding Spy with questions.
“Why’d you spike Demo’s booze with lighter oil, huh?!”
Dammit! I wanted to be the one to ask that question. But yes, why did you do it?
Spy kicks Scout out of his face. “I did no such thing. If that filthy outbacker is trying to frame me, he’s lying.”
To apparently prove his point, he hands me the lighter from earlier. I take it.
It looks… normal. I don’t know what I’m looking at. I open it and see nothing odd.
Spy rolls his eyes. “Look at the body. Closely. There are fingerprints.”
Well, now that I’m looking closer, I can see vague prints. But what’s that supposed to imply? Whose prints are they?
“Sniper is the only one of us with his fingerprints still intact.”
Oh yeah.
“If those bottles were spiked, he’s the one who did it.”
So now we’re back in Sniper’s little outback hidey-hole thing, staring the slimy little twerp down into the ground. We’ve got the lighter, and we’re not happy. Scout lets me go first this time.
I shove the lighter in Sniper’s face. These are your fingerprints. You spiked Demo’s booze with lighter fluid to make him act ‘suspicious’, frame him, and when that didn’t work, you blamed it on Spy!
I fully expect Sniper to scowl at me, but he just sighs instead.
“I took the light for a cig, mate. I don’t even know how to take one of those things apart and remove the oil.”
Does he expect me just to believe that? Because I definitely would if Scout wasn’t here to keep me from being too naiive. I retract the lighter and put it in my pocket, but we’re not done here.
“Did Demoman even complain about me? Did he say something?”
Well, no… he mentioned Spy, specifically.
“So I guess you’ve got the wrong bloke.”
Hmph. Maybe I’m too trusting, but it really seems like it here.
Spy has moved to the break room to set up a pool game. He very obnoxiously sighs when he sees me and Scout again. “What is it this time?”
“We still don’t trust you.”
“Did I ask to be trusted?”
We go back and forth with Spy for a while once more. He claims that yes, he did lend Sniper his lighter for a smoke, but had no part in the poisoning. Demoman’s story contradicts that. He said Spy, specifically.
“The man is constantly inebriated. How can he be sure anything he sees is real?”
Alright then. Back to Demo’s room (with Scout standing a respectable distance behind me). He’s still passed out, but wakes easily with a slight shake. He mumbles and sputters over his words as he removes the fog from his brain, slowly sitting himself up.
“Huh, whuh, …Pyro?”
Yep. Me, Pyro. We’re just here to ask a quick question.
He flops back down. “Ohhh, alright then.”
It’s almost like a breath of fresh air to have someone so compliant. Say… are you absolutely sure Spy was the one going through your whiskey?
“What? Of course!” He sits up way faster and way more wobbly than I’m comfortable with. “I heard that rat bastard mutterin’ in French about ‘stupid Australians’ and somethin’ about immaturity…”
Woah. That’s more useful information than I’ve gotten all day.
“If that little traitor hadn’t have snuck off before I could get to my stash, I’d have squashed the man like a beetle!”
I’m sure you would, Demo. Now go back to bed before you break down or throw up.
Barging into the break room, again. Demo was too sure about it being you, Spy. You’re up to something.
“How can you tell it wasn’t the Bushman disguised as me?”
Are you kidding me.
We search Sniper’s room up and down and manage to find one of Spy’s disguise kits. So that’s another blow to his credibility. Spy doesn’t just leave these lying around, either. He had to have either stolen it extremely well, or Spy lended it to him. I’m not sure which one is more implausible than the other.
When we find Sniper he’s just as useless as ever. He says he found it lying around the field. I find that hard to believe. I find everything hard to believe. A lot of things aren’t adding up and I’m starting to get thirsty. Sniper suggests we go return it to Spy and ask him why he left it out in the open. Go interrogate him again.
I really don’t want to.
Ok. This is ridiculous.
I’m running around in circles with these assholes! This is getting exhausting for both me and Scout, and he’s not quiet about it.
“Those sick, stupid bastards!” He kicks a can down the hall. “I’m about ready to bash some skulls here!”
Wait. That’s a good idea. Knock ‘em out. Get them in one room together. We need to do that.
“...You serious?”
Yes!
“Hell yeah!”
Turns out, sneaking up on a man specializing in espionage and stealth missions is a lot harder than you’d think. Scout very easily catches Sniper focused on some mundane task and clobbers him over the head with a bat, but when we get to Spy, it’s a pain in the ass. He’s quick on his feet and dodges like none other. I eventually have to settle on just shooting him, knocking him out, and then pumping him full of Medic’s weird Medi-Gun juice to make sure he doesn’t die on me. Then we get them tied up onto some chairs and hauled into the garage.
Scout and I make sure to stay out of sight when they wake. They look at each other and scowl.
“Why’d you throw me under the bus, Spy?”
“Was there an agreement not to?”
Ahah!
Scout and I jump out from behind a table and confront the hostages directly. Scout looks strangely excited to be in this position.
“Shoulda shut your trap, dumbass!”
So you both were in on it, planning the heist and stealing the comics together, only to trickstab each other in the back when the questions got difficult, huh!?
Sniper nods nonchalantly. Spy is less eager to admit it, but caves in with a scowl.
…Actually, I was just throwing educated accusations at the wall and seeing what stuck. I didn’t expect to be so thoroughly correct like that.
Honestly, I didn’t expect anything less from the two. Whether or not they were working together, they’d still be at each other’s throats. Pathetic. But there’s one more thing that doesn’t make sense to me.
Why’d you do it?
Spy immediately turns his head right to Sniper’s.
The silence is deafening. Sniper looks like he wants to drop a bomb on the whole state with him in range. Which isn’t too far off from what he usually looks like, but there’s even more dread here.
Scout raises an eyebrow. “You like those comics?”
Sniper nods. There’s a flash of terror in his eyes when he realizes what he said and that Scout is about to say something extremely humiliating. My stomach falls into a pit with second-hand embarassment.
A van crashes through the garage door before that happens, though. Sniper’s van. This is no less than divine intervention. It stops just short of the two men we’ve tied up.
There’s a substantial amount of relief on Sniper’s face when he sees Heavy pop out of the driver’s seat with a body over his shoulder, while the rest of our friends appear with other different insane findings. Something to distract from this mess. It’s going to be extremely difficult for Sniper and Spy to explain why they were tied up like this, though. Scout and I have a silent agreement to keep the story a secret for use as blackmail.
Through all the chaos (and quick releasing of our hostages), Scout has one more question to discreetly ask Sniper.
“Hey, uhh… where did’ja put the comics after you took ‘em?”
“Under Demo’s bed.”