(See
Author's Note: Double January for background)
January 27th - Take 1
Thus came the day. I slipped in through the sewers, made use of my keycard, slipped around every guard patrol, and made it to the laboratories. It was the early hours of the morning, when it was still pitch black out and the scientists had been there for hours and were just about ready to go home and sleep through the morning.
I gathered up the equipment I was going to steal, but when I went for the chemicals and the samples, I tripped an alarm. My planned point of egress was no longer accessible, and it was time to break out the teleporter. The very one that had only ever worked once. I activated it.
Immediately, I felt as if I was drowning, sucked through some kind of suddenly malleable fabric, something that had held the universe together and now I was falling through it as it tried to consume me. Just before I blacked out, I emerged into January 1st, for the second time. (Return to
Double January: Day 1 - The Crow for the continuation.)
January 27th - Take 2
I instantly took the place of my past counterpart, as soon as she vanished, and E did likewise. We snatched up our loot and ran for it, the scientists hot on our heels. Totally unaware that we'd replaced ourselves, they thought we'd just showed up. Definitely not prepared for us to have spent two overlapping months constructing a trap.
Plastic headstones and large amounts of dirt in an older lab would normally just throw someone off, but I'd spent a lot of time curating a knowledge of what these people were afraid of. And also dosing their lunches with an anxiety-inducing chemical that would be exacerbated by a sprinkler system full of a carefully crafted hallucinogen.
Confronted by the manifestations of their guilt over the experiments they'd been running, they were trapped in a prison of their own making, drowning in torment. And also in a thick sticky substance that would keep them from following me out of the lab and further the oppressive physical sensations of the hallucinogen.
I left with a massive haul of loot, walking out the front door.
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